By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Iambic pentameter has been around in English verse for … well, almost as long as English verse itself has been around.
Certainly, since the late fourteenth century when Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400), arguably England’s first great poet, used iambic pentameter in his work, this five-foot and ten-syllable verse line has proved indispensable to pretty much every great poet writing in the language, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, and beyond.