Blank Verse
Quick answer: Blank verse guide: unrhymed iambic pentameter from Surrey and Shakespeare to Milton and Frost, how the line works, and how to write it with control.
Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter: five iambic feet to the line, da-DUM five times, with no rhyme scheme at all. That plain recipe underwrites more great English poetry than any other form. Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, Wordsworth's The Prelude, and a large share of Frost and Stevens are all blank verse. It is the closest metre to educated English speech, which is precisely its power and its danger.
The 'blank' simply means the rhyme is absent. Everything else, the pulse of the pentameter, the placement of pauses, the run of sentences across lines, is present and doing constant, quiet work. Blank verse is not free verse; it is form wearing plain clothes.
Five hundred years of the plain line
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, invented English blank verse in the 1540s while translating two books of Virgil's Aeneid, wanting a rhymeless English equivalent of Latin epic. Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc (1561) took it to the stage, Marlowe supercharged it in Tamburlaine, and Shakespeare spent a career flexing it from ceremonial stiffness to the broken murmur of Lear. Milton chose it for Paradise Lost (1667), adding a defiant preface calling rhyme no necessary adjunct of true poetry. The Romantics made it the metre of autobiography and meditation, Tennyson and Browning of monologue, and the Americans, Frost and Stevens above all, of modern speech thinking aloud.
The rules and the licences
The base line is iambic pentameter: ten syllables, five stresses, rising rhythm. The art lives in sanctioned variations: an inverted first foot (DUM-da) for attack, a feminine ending (an eleventh, unstressed syllable, everywhere in Hamlet's most famous speech), a mid-line caesura that shifts position line by line, and enjambment that lets syntax stride over the line-break.
The masters differ exactly here. Marlowe end-stops thunder; Milton builds sentences of a dozen lines, the sense, as he put it, variously drawn out; Frost tunes the line to the loose idiom of talk. One discipline is shared: the variations mean nothing unless the underlying beat stays audible. Break the pattern often enough and you are writing prose with margins.
Writing it: a practical regime
Compose by the sentence, not the line. Write a sentence of your subject in natural English, then carve it into pentameters, promoting strong words to stress positions and demoting filler. Scan your first drafts aloud, marking stresses with a pencil until your ear no longer needs the pencil.
Then manage your pauses. In any ten-line stretch, the caesura should wander: after the fourth syllable, the sixth, the seventh, absent entirely. Let perhaps a third of your lines run over. And keep one line in each passage absolutely regular, a tuning fork the reader's ear can return to. Blank verse remains a strong choice for contest work: judges reading for structure and language can hear metrical control within three lines, long before a rhyme could prove anything.
What it carries best, and the great temptation
Blank verse carries thought: monologue, meditation, narrative, argument, memory. It is the metre for a mind moving at the speed of speech, which is why dramatists and autobiographers keep choosing it.
The great temptation is slackness. Because no rhyme enforces the line-end, weak drafts drift by ten-syllable prose that scans nowhere. The opposite vice, metronomic da-DUM with no variation, is rarer but deadlier to the ear. Hold the beat; vary the surface; read Frost's 'Mending Wall' for the balance.
What poets can take from this
- Draft in sentences, then carve them into lines with strong words on the beats.
- Vary caesura position constantly; a wandering pause keeps verse alive.
- Enjamb about a third of your lines, and end-stop for emphasis.
- Use feminine endings and inverted first feet as deliberate effects.
- Keep one perfectly regular line per passage as a tuning fork.
- Scan drafts aloud; the ear catches what the eye forgives.
Try it yourself
Write twenty lines of blank verse in which someone repairs something ordinary, a fence, a bicycle, a hem, while thinking about something they cannot repair.
Questions
What is blank verse?
Unrhymed iambic pentameter: lines of five iambic feet with no rhyme scheme. It is the metre of Shakespeare's plays, Paradise Lost and The Prelude, and is distinct from free verse, which has no fixed metre.
Who invented blank verse?
The Earl of Surrey introduced it in the 1540s in his translation of parts of Virgil's Aeneid. Marlowe and Shakespeare established it on stage, and Milton fixed it as the English epic metre.
Is blank verse the same as free verse?
No. Blank verse keeps a strict iambic pentameter pulse and only drops rhyme. Free verse drops both rhyme and regular metre. Whitman wrote free verse; Wordsworth wrote blank verse.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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