home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Understanding McLuhan
/
Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
/
pc
/
mcluhan.dxr
/
08881_Field_TCGG T646.txt
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1996-04-10
|
1KB
|
16 lines
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