Blank verse is a type of poetry that has a regular rhythm but does not use rhyming words. It is most often written in iambic pentameter, which means each line has a pattern of ten beats, made up of five pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables. This form has been called "probably the most common and influential form of English poetry since the 16th century." Paul Fussell estimated that "about three quarters of all English poetry is written in blank verse."

The first known use of blank verse in English was by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in his translation of the Aeneid (written around 1540; published after his death, between 1554 and 1557). He may have been influenced by the Latin original, as classical Latin poetry did not use rhyme, or he may have been inspired by Ancient Greek poetry or the Italian verse form called versi sciolti, both of which also did not use rhyme.

The play Arden of Faversham (written around 1590 by an unknown author) is a well-known example of end-stopped blank verse, where each line ends with a pause before the next line begins.

In English

The play Gorboduc, written in 1561 by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, was the first English play to use blank verse. Christopher Marlowe was the first English writer to gain great recognition for his use of blank verse. William Shakespeare and John Milton made major contributions to English blank verse. Shakespeare wrote much of his plays in unrhymed iambic pentameter, while Milton’s Paradise Lost is written entirely in blank verse. Milton’s style of blank verse was widely copied by 18th-century poets like James Thomson (The Seasons) and William Cowper (The Task). Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats also used blank verse often. Later, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, became well known for using blank verse in poems like The Princess and Ulysses. In America, Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens used blank verse in long poems during a time when many poets were turning to free verse.

Marlowe and Shakespeare greatly expanded the use of blank verse in the late 1500s. Marlowe was the first to use blank verse for powerful and complex speeches, as seen in this example:

"You stars that reign'd at my nativity, Whose infl'ence hath allotted death and hell, Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist Into the entrails of yon lab'ring clouds…"

Shakespeare built on Marlowe’s work and also used blank verse for sudden, irregular speech. For example, in King John, one line of verse is split between two characters:

"My lord? A grave. He shall not live. Enough."

Shakespeare also used enjambment, where a sentence continues from one line to the next, and later used feminine endings, where the last syllable of a line is unstressed. These techniques made his blank verse rich and varied.

Shakespeare’s flexible use of blank verse influenced his peers, but some later writers used it less skillfully. However, John Webster and Thomas Middleton used Shakespearean blank verse successfully in their plays. Ben Jonson, on the other hand, used a more structured form of blank verse in his comedies Volpone and The Alchemist.

Blank verse was rarely used in non-dramatic poetry until John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where he used it with great freedom. Milton’s blank verse supported complex sentences and ideas, as shown in these lines:

"…Into what Pit thou seest From what highth fal'n, so much the stronger provd He with his Thunder: and till then who knew The force of those dire Arms?…"

Milton also wrote Paradise Regained and parts of Samson Agonistes in blank verse. After Milton, blank verse was used less often in both dramatic and non-dramatic poetry until the 18th century. John Dryden’s tragedy All for Love and James Thomson’s The Seasons are notable examples from this time. John Dyer’s The Fleece was influential but not widely appreciated.

At the end of the 18th century, William Cowper revived blank verse in his work The Task (1784). Cowper’s influence led to the next generation of poets, including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who used blank verse in works like Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, and The Excursion. Wordsworth’s verse was more regular than Milton’s but still flexible. Coleridge’s blank verse was more technical, as seen in his poem "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison." Keats’s blank verse in Hyperion was inspired by Milton, while Shelley’s work in The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound resembled older styles.

Victorian poets like Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning used blank verse in their works. Tennyson’s blank verse in poems like Ulysses and The Princess was musical and structured, while Browning’s was more direct and conversational. Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera Princess Ida (1884) used blank verse in its dialogue, based on Tennyson’s The Princess.

Throughout the 20th century, blank verse was used in both original poetry and translations of older works. Robert Frost, for example, used blank verse in many of his narrative poems.

In German

Blank verse is often used in German writing. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing included it in his play Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) in 1779. The lines in this work have 10 or 11 syllables:

Ja, Daja; Gott sei Dank! Doch warum endlich? Hab ich denn eher wiederkommen wollen? Und wiederkommen können? Babylon Ist von Jerusalem, wie ich den Weg, Seitab bald rechts, bald links, zu nehmen bin Genötigt worden, gut zweihundert Meilen; Und Schulden einkassieren, ist gewiss Auch kein Geschäft, das merklich fördert, das So von der Hand sich schlagen lässt.