With the rhythmic march of
heroic couplets the poem then quickly escalates to an outright call for Britain "to wield / The beamy spear" and revive the "martial ardour" of its own heroic past (320).
Byron's use and abuse of the 'unpopular'
heroic couplet in The Corsair flaunts the discrepancy between his aristocratic manner and liberal politics.
But the key, if there is a key, to the enduring popularity of The Rape of the Lock is the use of the
heroic couplet to include--sometimes in great cataloged lists--those minute, precise, and most revealing details about the age and the characters that peopled it.
On the other hand, recalling his previous experience with the
heroic couplet in EBSR, he expresses "regret" for using the verse form to attack Walter Scott, for whom he has since expressed admiration.
For example, if it is true that the
heroic couplet, as Dryden handles it, 'by the reiterated end-stopped lines which the rhyme and designed pauses produce, halts or constrains the emotion, preventing any overflow of feeling', that is emphatically not true of rhyming alexandrines as Racine handles them.
Critics praised him for the development of the closed
heroic couplet (a rhyming couplet that contains a complete idea).
A
heroic couplet is composed of two lines of iambic pentameter, both lines being end-stopped.
Soon he developed a more restrained and natural style, close to normal cultivated speech and employing the
heroic couplet to emphasize its finish and point.
In poetry, the
heroic couplet was the favored satiric form of the age and, during the English Restoration, the comedy of manners was a popular form of satirical drama.
The
heroic couplet became the principal meter used in drama in about the mid-17th century, and the form was perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
The romance, with its emphasis on individual heroism and on the exotic and the mysterious, was in clear contrast to the elegant formality and artificiality of prevailing classical forms of literature, such as the French Neoclassical tragedy or the English
heroic couplet in poetry.
English traveler, poet, colonist, and foreign-service career officer who played an important part in the development of English verse, especially of the
heroic couplet.
