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How did Shakespeare, John Milton, and John Keats use blank verse?

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Blank verse is defined as unrhymed iambic pentameter. Each of these poets utilized this form to achieve distinct artistic effects:

William Shakespeare: He transformed blank verse into the primary vehicle for English dramatic poetry. While his early works often combined it with prose and rhymed couplets, his later plays—such as Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale—employed a more supple, stress-based blank verse. This allowed his writing to closely approximate the natural rhythms of speech while remaining capable of conveying complex human emotions like grief, delight, or perplexity.1
John Milton: He restored blank verse to its former grandeur in his epic poem Paradise Lost. Milton’s approach was intellectually complex and highly flexible, utilizing inversions, Latinized vocabulary, and varied line lengths and pauses to create profound descriptive and dramatic effects.1
John Keats: He employed blank verse in his 1820 poem Hyperion. While much of his earlier work, such as Endymion, utilized rhymed couplets, his use of blank verse in Hyperion demonstrates the form's versatility within the Romantic tradition.12