blank verse
The blank verse is a rhyming iambic five-lifter with a male or female cadence . The metric scheme is:
- ◡ — ◡ — ◡ — ◡ — ◡— (◡)
It is the classic dramatic verse in both English and German literature.
The popularity of blank verse, especially as a dramatic meter, stems from the fact that it is extraordinarily flexible and variable. It has no fixed caesura and breaks can be built in anywhere. The cadence can stay the same or change regularly or irregularly. Syntactic units can adapt to the verse unit or reach across verse boundaries ( enjambement ) and thus create tension and accelerate or slow down the pace of speech . Several speakers can share a verse and thus create drama ( Antilabe ).
The German word is a takeover from English blank verse . The adjective blank actually means 'empty' or 'undecorated' and here means 'rhyming'.
development
As the name suggests, the blank verse comes from English poetry. Forerunners can be found in the French verse commun , in the Italian hendecasilabo and in the (rhymed) English heroic verse . It goes back to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey , who in his 1540 translation of the Aeneid renounced the rhyme because the rhyme was believed to be incompatible with the dignity of the ancient epic. In the drama, the blank verse appears for the first time in the tragedy Gordobuc (first performed in 1562) by Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset and Thomas Norton . It then quickly became the standard meter of English drama, and the great playwrights of the 16th and 17th centuries, including Christopher Marlowe , Ben Jonson, and especially William Shakespeare , developed and refined it. In England in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, it was also used in thought poetry and narrative poetry, including by John Milton in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained . In the preface to Paradise Lost, Milton writes about the meter he used:
“The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and Virgil in Latin; Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have express them. "
“The meter is an English epic verse without rhyme, as in Homer in Greek and Virgil in Latin, the rhyme is neither a necessary feature nor a real ornament of a good meter, especially not in longer poems, but rather the invention of a barbaric age Compensation for unworthy subject and bumpy verse, since then indeed ennobled by some modern poets, who let themselves be seduced by fashion into drudgery, handicaps and being forced to express many things differently than they would otherwise have usually done better.
In Germany, the blank verse, based on translations from English literature, has been used since the end of the 17th century, initially only sporadically.
The blank verse in German
The first authors to use the blank verse in German include Christoph Martin Wieland ( Lady Johanna Gray , 1758) and Joachim Wilhelm von Brawe ( Brutus , created 1757/1758, published 1768). Gotthold Ephraim Lessing helped him achieve his final breakthrough with his "dramatic poem" Nathan the Wise (1779). The German dramatists of the classical period and the 19th century ( Friedrich Schiller , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Heinrich von Kleist , Franz Grillparzer , Friedrich Halm , Friedrich Hebbel and others) write their verse dramas predominantly in blank verse.
The blank verse has always been used for poems, often with narrative content. Well-known examples come from Friedrich Schiller ( The veiled picture of Sais ), Theodor Fontane ( Fritz Kratzfuß ), Theodor Storm ( Don't go in ), Conrad Ferdinand Meyer ( Il Pensieroso ), Carl Spitteler ( Between Iliad and Odyssey ), Rainer Maria Rilke ( Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes ), Hugo von Hofmannsthal ( The Maiden and Death ), Rudolf Borchardt ( The Confession of Bocchino Belfortis ), Gerhart Hauptmann ( The Toys ). In the second half of the 20th century, the use of the blank verse decreased in the FRG, in the GDR, however, the verse remained alive and was used a lot. A modern example from the 21st century is the cycle of poems in the blank verse of an empty corridor by the rapper and poet Schwartz .
Longer narrative texts and verses have also been written in blank verse; Examples are Geron, the nobleman by Christoph Martin Wieland and Goliath by Friedrich Wilhelm Weber .
Blank verses in the context of a prose text can be found, for example, in Klabunds Ben Jonson and the Rogue .
Often blank verses were used for utility and occasion poems, for example on the occasion of the inauguration of monuments, theater openings or memorial events.
Finally, the blank verse was also used to translate poems from foreign languages into German, although these are often not written in blank verse themselves; Gottfried August Bürger, for example, had begun to translate the Iliad into blank verse before the hexameter translations of the Homeric epics prevailed; Christoph Martin Wieland put Horace's letters in blank verse because they seemed more suitable to him than the German hexameter , which would have been more obvious as a translation of the Horace hexameter.
Examples
An early, self-referential example from the ode Der Gegen-Parnassus by Samuel Gotthold Lange , in which the blank verse appears in an organized manner (later poems use it almost exclusively in engraving ):
Unleashed by rhyme, my sure foot hurries on Flaccu's
path. I laugh happily and boldly,
Of the dark gaps and the steep abysses,
And also of the furious screams of the rhymers,
I rise to the stars,
free from giddiness, Far below my path Battus Bruth raves,
And blasphemes the steps too daring to him,
And laments the broken laws.
Metrically precise Goethe , here the first verses of his Iphigenie auf Tauris :
Out into your shadows, lively tops of the
old, holy, leafy grove,
As in the goddess's quiet sanctuary,
I step still now with a shuddering feeling,
As if I were entering her for the first time,
And my mind does not get used to it [... ]
A comparatively short blank verse poem by an author who is better known as a user of rhymes is Der Schlaf by Christian Morgenstern :
Sleep sends its troops into the night,
fiends, legions upon legion ...
They creep up to their victim from their backs,
on silent paws, and embrace it
like bears, inescapably and noiselessly -
until all its muscles are slack and dumb
from their chest the body rolls to the ground ...
And when everything is laid down,
they trot back to their master,
and their rumbling fills
the gloomy forest mountains of his kingdom like dull thunder .
literature
- Alfred Behrmann : Introduction to the newer German verse. From Luther to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart 1990, pp. 30-43.
- TVF Brogan et al. a .: Blank verses. In: Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman et al. (Ed.): The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th edition. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2012, ISBN 978-0-691-13334-8 , pp. 145–150 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
- Otto Knörrich: Lexicon of lyrical forms (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 479). 2nd, revised edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-520-47902-8 , p. 30 f ..
- Christoph Küper: Blank verse. In: Klaus Weimar (Hrsg.): Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft . Vol. 1. De Gruyter, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-11-010896-8 , pp. 238-240.
- Gero von Wilpert : Subject dictionary of literature. 8th edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-520-84601-3 , p. 94 f.
