Blank Verse, or verse without rhyme, a name applied especially to the iambic pentameter or unrhymed five-foot iambic, the so-called heroic verse, the regular measure of English dramatic and epic poetry. The first specimen of blank verse in English is a translation of the second and fourth books of Virgil's Aeneid, by the Earl of Surrey (beheaded in 1547); but it had been used freely by Italian and Spanish writers as early as about the beginning of that century. The first example of an English poem of any length (not dramatic) in blank verse is The Steele Glas (1576) of Gascoigne. Two short poems of Nicholas Grimald, published in Tottel's Miscellany in 1557, are the earliest specimens in English of original blank verse. In England the adaptation of this verse to the drama, from its elasticity and the freedom gained by the variations of the pause, was at once felt, and in that department of poetry it soon became and has continued dominant, if we except the effort made by Dryden and others, after the Restoration, to return to rhymed plays. For dramatic purposes the four-accent line is too short, and breaks the sense too often, while the six-accent line is so long as to be tedious without the relief of rhyme. The five-accent verse was a satisfactory mean between the two. The dramatic line, representing the language of actual life, approaches more nearly to prose, and consequently enjoys more license than any other metre. Not merely is the trochee freely substituted for the iambus after any pause however slight, but an extra syllable is also allowed at the end of a line or sentence (even in Milton), and in some cases even two extra syllables, if these do not interfere with the regular recurrence of the accent.
Of course in verses of five accents it is impossible to divide the line into two equal parts, so that there must needs be variation in the position of the pause to avoid what would otherwise be unendurable monotony. In verse without rhyme much of the beauty of the rhythm depends on the poet's skilfulness in the variation of the pause, and no one has varied it with more boldness and finer effect than Milton. Professor Mayor points out that 'Tennyson and Browning, as compared with Milton, have more lines with final, but without internal pause; somewhat fewer with internal, but without final pause; about the same without any pause at all. As to the forbidden internal pauses, they use the pause after the first, third, and ninth syllables more frequently than Milton, and do not differ much from him in their use of the pause after one and a half, two, and eight. With regard to the middle pauses, those which divide the feet, coming after the fifth or seventh syllable, are more favoured by the moderns than by Milton, whose commonest pause is after the sixth syllable, and then longo intervallo after the fourth. The pause after the fourth seems to be Tennyson's favourite, while Browning seems to prefer the fifth and seventh. This last also abounds in Swinburne. Feminine ending is very rare in Browning, but in Tennyson is hardly less frequent than in Milton. Nor is there any marked difference as regards substitution of feet, except that the non-initial trochee is more common in Milton than in the others.' The initial trochee is as common in Surrey as in Milton. The rhythm of the former is frequently harsh and abrupt. Trisyllabic feet are not infrequent, and as often as not there is no middle pause. Marlowe's rhythm is much more regular in accentuation than Surrey's, but occasionally we find monosyllabic feet and lines of nine syllables formed by initial truncation. Feminine rhythm is also more frequent than in Surrey's usage, and even the two superfluous syllables at the end of the line occur here also. Many of Shakespeare's defective lines are capable of explanation by a pause or a lengthened syllable. Examples of elision and slurring are frequent, and trisyllabic feet are not uncommon, but genuine Alexandrines are not numerous. The superfluous syllable at the end is rare in his earlier plays, but there is a steady increase in its use in the later plays. It is but rarely a monosyllable, still more rarely an emphatic monosyllable. Such amphibrachic or 'double endings' are especially common in Fletcher's verse.
Dryden followed Corneille in demanding rhyme for the dignity of tragedy. He sums up its advantages in aid to the memory, in additional grace added by the sweetness of rhyme to the smartness of a repartee, and in the limits that it lays upon the fancy, which without such restraint tends to outrun judgment. Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) was the first great poem in our literature written in blank verse. Appended at the publisher's request was a short preface in three sentences, entitled 'The Verse.' Here the poet, with customary vigour of phrase, claims exemption from 'the troublesome and modern bondage of riming . . . to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight . . . no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre.' From Milton's time blank verse has been as common a form for narrative, didactic, or descriptive poetry, as rhymed couplets with their 'jingling sound of like endings.' Some would restrict the name blank verse to the ordinary heroic metre or lines of ten syllables; by others the term is applied more widely to unrhymed lines, irrespective of their length, from such examples as the Hiawatha of Longfellow, which contains eight syllables in its lines, to his Evangeline, which has as many as sixteen or even more.
The five-foot iambic appears early in both Italian and French, but in neither did it shake off the bondage of rhyme, as it did in England by the middle of the 16th century, so as to offer a sufficiently strong and flexible form for dramatic and epic poetry. French influences long exercised a restraining effect on its use in German, but English freedom made its way through the efforts of the elder Schlegel, Wieland, Klopstock, Herder, and others, until Lessing employed the unrhymed five-foot iambic in his Nathan in 1778, and thus set a precedent for its use in dramatic poetry. In earlier German verse in this measure as in French, each five-foot line was complete in itself, but Lessing introduced the usage of the Italians, and still more the English, of connecting lines by enjambement and building them up into long periods. Schiller's first plays were written in prose, but in 1786 he began to employ the five-foot iambic as modified by Lessing.
See chapters ix.-xii. of J. B. Mayor's Chapters on English Metre (1886), with its 'Postscript' containing a summary of an essay by Zarncke (Leip. 1865).