in literature, unrhymed poetry, typically in iambic pentameter, and as such, the dominant verse form of English dramatic and narrative poetry since the mid-16th century. Blank verse was adapted by Italian Renaissance writers from classical sources; it became the standard form of such dramatists as Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Battista Guarini. From Italy blank verse was brought into English literature by the poet Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, who first used it in his translation of Vergil’s Aeneid. Christopher Marlowe used it for dramatic verse; and Shakespeare transformed blank verse into a supple instrument, uniquely capable of conveying speech rhythms and emotional overtones. According to John Milton, only unrhymed verse could give English the dignity of a classical language. As he explained in the preface to his epic Paradise Lost, one of the greatest of all poems in blank verse:

The Measure is English Heroic Verse

without Rhyme, as that of Homer in

Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; Rhyme

being no necessary Adjunct to true

Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in

larger Works especially. . .

Later English poets such as the 19th-century romantics William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats employed the form; in the hands of still later poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, for example, and the Americans Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, blank verse was employed for less lofty themes, becoming more colloquial in tone. Blank verse has also been extensively used for dramatic poetry in Germany since the 18th century, notably in Nathan der Weise, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and in the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and Gerhart Hauptmann. It is also a standard form in Swedish, Russian, and Polish verse drama.

For further information on this topic, see the Bibliography, sections 819. Poetry–820. Versification.