Abstract
The most obvious way in which the sentence structure of Wordsworth’s blank verse differs from that of the ballad-type poems and the poems in ballad measure is in sentence length and consequently the complexity of the syntax. The differences are partly the result of the metrical forms. The short stanzas of the ballads prescribed limits to clause and sentence length. Blank verse more readily allows for run-on lines and longer statements. However, even in his blank verse the language of Wordsworth’s experimentation in the ballads has left its mark in the shorter sentences interspersed among the longer ones.1
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Notes
This effect has also been noticed by Howard S. Babb in Jane Austen’s Novels: the Fabric of Dialogue (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1967), pp. 10–11.
For a fuller treatment of this subject see Frances Austin, ‘Time, Experience and Syntax in Wordsworth’s Poetry’ in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, LXX (1969), 724–37.
Milton, in fact, is not as Latinate as previously thought, although he does use some Latinate constructions, including this. See Thomas N. Corns, The Development of Milton’s Prose Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
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© 1989 Frances Austin
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Austin, F. (1989). Blank Verse — Syntax. In: The Language of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Language of Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20001-6_5
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