blank verse

plural blank verses

1. countableuncountablecommunicationsA poetic form with regular meter, particularly iambic pentameter, but no fixed rhyme scheme.

   Milton's command of blank verse exceeds even Shakespeare's.

   3 more examples

   [T]here is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

   1592, Robert Greene, Groats-Worth of Witte, Bought with a Million of Repentance, London: imprinted for William Wright, folio F¹v

   I could have spoken in blank verse of Shakespearean beauty, all sorts of great ideas flashed through my mind; it was as though the bonds of my flesh had been loosened, and left the spirit free to soar to the empyrean of its native power.

   1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, “The Spirit of Life”, in She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC, page 288

   Soon after Surrey's translation of Virgil, blank verse became a persuasive rival to the heroic couplet.

   2006, Philip Hobsbaum, “The heroic couplet”, in Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form, Routledge, →ISBN, page 18