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).
20) His use of the
heroic couplet in EBSR can thus be seen as an attempt to promote and preserve the legacy of neoclassical British satiric poetry from the revival of traditional Scottish forms that had become popular once again chiefly through the efforts of Scottish writers and ballad collectors like Burns and Walter Scott.
Despite the Classical subject and the
heroic couplets, the young Beddoes' macabre fascinations shine through--had the subject of the 1821 prize indeed been the Laocoon, it is hard to imagine it being awarded to a work of such untrammelled grisliness.
The works that each produced looked to the neoclassical and the
heroic couplets that reflected the techniques engaged during this period.
Cunningham all but own the couplet form for contemporary poetry, and Cassity is an outright virtuoso, writing not only
heroic couplets, but the tetrameter and dimeter variety, and employing, as Tuma has noted, a rich variety of sonic devices including polysyllabic and hudibrastic rhymes.
His target in the Dunciad is his era's epidemic of bad writing - here, wrong-headed metaphors - and he doesn't just describe them, he writes them; yet simultaneously he can't help but produce
heroic couplets of supernal elegance.
Though Pope's Iliad is the most complete poetic adaptation of Homer's epic in its own right we are likely to have in English, his
heroic couplets are a far cry from Homer's unrhymed, rugged hexameters.
