Byron's use and abuse of the 'unpopular'
heroic couplet in The Corsair flaunts the discrepancy between his aristocratic manner and liberal politics.
Pope, perhaps more than anyone else writing poetry in the eighteenth century, demonstrated the flexibility of the
heroic couplet. Shaped by his pen, it contains pithy aphorisms, social commentary, challenging puns, and delightful bathos.
In 1808, Hemans, then Felicia Browne, launched her prodigious writing career with a 622-line occasional poem in
heroic couplets directly responding to the Spanish resistance to Napoleon's invasion of Spain earlier that year.
Ignoring "public opinion," Byron, with some difficulty, explains his decision to reinstate the
heroic couplet. On the one hand, he refuses to dismiss his literary forefathers--Dryden, Pope, and Gifford--now out of public favor.
This is the first known English use of the decasyllabic couplet, which Chaucer then used for most of the Canterbury Tales and which evolved into the
heroic couplet.
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.
The preeminent English couplet is the
heroic couplet, two rhyming lines of iambic pentameter with a caesura (pause), usually in the middle of each line.
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.
Critics praised him for the development of the closed
heroic couplet (a rhyming couplet that contains a complete idea).
heroic couplet A couplet of rhyming iambic pentameters often forming a distinct rhetorical as well as metrical unit.
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.
