SOURCE: Oras, Ants. “Surrey's Technique of Phonetic Echoes: A Method and Its Background.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 50 (1951): 289-308.

In the following essay, Oras discusses Surrey's blank verse translation of the Aeneid, maintaining that the work is very likely the first use of blank verse in English.

I

The opening lines of the Earl of Surrey's version of the second book of the Aeneid read as follows:¹

They whisted all, with fixed face attent, When prince Aeneas from the royal seat Thus gan to speak: “O Quene! it is thy wil I should renew a woe cannot be told, How that the Grekes did spoile and ouerthrow The Phrygian wealth and wailful realm of Troy: Those ruthfull things that I my self beheld … 

These—probably the first lines of blank verse written in English² if we disregard the somewhat doubtful precedent in Chaucer's Tale of Melibeus—are...