What is especially significant is the discovery of blank verse as 
a broadcasting megaphone and the consciousness that jigging 
rhymes cannot provide the sweep and volume of public 
utterance that is resonating in the new age. Blank verse to the 
Elizabethan was as exciting a novelty as the “close up” in a 
Griffith’s movie, and the two are much alike in the intensity of 
amplification and exaggeration of feeling. Even Whitman, 
impelled by the new visual intensities of the newspaper of his 
time, did not devise a louder vehicle for his barbaric yawp than 
blank verse. Nobody has been willing to offer a theory of the 
origin of English blank verse. It has no antecedents or 
exemplars except, perhaps, in the long melodic line of medieval 
music. I do not think Kenneth Sisam’s idea of Old English metre 
has any bearing on blank verse. He writes in Fourteenth Century  
Verse and Prose  (p. xiii): “Old English had a single metre—the 
long alliterative line without rime. It was best suited to