blank verse

In literature, the unrhymed iambic pentameter or ten-syllable line of five stresses. First used by the Italian Gian Giorgio Trissino in his tragedy Sofonisba (1514-15), it was introduced to England in about 1540 by the Earl of Surrey, who used it in his translation of Virgil's Aeneid. It was developed by Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare, quickly becoming the distinctive verse form of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. It was later used by Milton in Paradise Lost (1667) and by Wordsworth in The Prelude (1805). More recent exponents of blank verse in English include Thomas Hardy, T S Eliot, and Robert Frost.

After its introduction from Italy, blank verse was used with increasing freedom by Shakespeare, John Fletcher, John Webster, and Thomas Middleton. It was remodelled by John Milton, who was imitated in the 18th century by James Thomson, Edward Young, and William Cowper, and revived in the early 19th century by Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, and later by Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.