Blank verse

"BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters -- the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind."

"Blank verse really deserving the name I believe...to be impossible except to one or two eminent writers in a generation."

"I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original."

"He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse: but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme."

"Blank verse seems to be verse only to the eye."

"Rhyme is no necessary adjunct of true poetry."

"As it is generally seen, blank verse seems to be only a laborious and doubtful struggle to escape from the fangs of prose. [I]f it ever ventures to relax into simple and natural phraseology, it instantly becomes tame and the prey of its pursuer."

"If some gentlemen are resolved that blank verse shall be prose, they have my free leave to enjoy their saying, provided I may have theirs to think they mean nothing by it, unless they can prove that rhyme is essential to metre; consequently that the Goths and monks were the first inventers of verse, and that Homer and Virgil, as well as Milton, wrote nothing but prose."