Blank verse ,as the name suggests that it is empty of something, so that is, the lack of rhymes. It consists of iambic pentameter i.e. five stress iambic verse which are unrhymed. Hence, it is termed as 'blank'. It is like the natural speech.
The blank verse was introduced by the Earl of Surrey in the translations of books 2 and 4 of Virgil's Aenied. It has been used well by Elizabethans.
A free form of blank verse is used by twentieth century playwrights like Maxwell Anderson and T. S. Eliot.
John Milton used blank verse in the epic poem, Paradise Lost (1667), James Thomson for the descriptive poem, Seasons (1726-30),
William Wordsworth for his autobiographical Prelude (1805), Alfred, Lord Tennyson for the narrative Idylls of the King (1891), Robert Browning for The Ring
and the Book (1868-69) and many dramatic monologues, and T. S. Eliot for much of The Waste Land (1922).
Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight,"
Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey,"
Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears", and
Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning."
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