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Friday, September 10, 2021

Definition and Examples of Heroic couplet – Literary terms

Tags: heroic couplet definition, heroic couplet example, what is heroic couplet, heroic couplet poems



Definition and Examples of Heroic couplet – Literary terms

Heroic couplet:

A pair of rhyming IAMBIC PENTAMETER lines; the favored VERSE FORM of eighteenth-century neoclassical poets. Although it was introduced by Geoffrey Chaucer, this couplet takes its name from its use in the heroic DRAMA of John Dryden and the MOCK EPICS of Alexander Pope. In the hands of these and other neoclassical writers, the closed form of the heroic couplet (each couplet syntactically complete) proved to be an appropriate instrument (one might almost say weapon) for their aphoristic WIT. A few lines from Pope's Essay on Criticism will show the typical pattern of a complete thought every two lines: 

Whatever Nature has in worth denied,

She gives in large recruits of needful pride;

For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find

What wants in blood and spirits, swelled with wind:

Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defense,

 And fills up all the mighty void of sense.

If once right reason drives that cloud away, .

Truth breaks upon us with resistless day.

Trust not yourself; but your defects to know,

Make use of every friend and every foe.

Tags: heroic couplet definition, heroic couplet example, what is heroic couplet, heroic couplet poems

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