heroic couplet

American  

noun

Prosody.

1. a stanza consisting of two rhyming lines in iambic pentameter, especially one forming a rhetorical unit and written in an elevated style, as, Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of Mankind is Man.

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heroic couplet British  

noun

1. prosody a verse form consisting of two rhyming lines in iambic pentameter

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Etymology

Origin of heroic couplet

First recorded in 1900–05

Example Sentences

At the approach of the 18th century, John Dryden offered Virgil as a master of the heroic couplet: "Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by Fate,/ And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate."

From Time Magazine Archive

Monkhouse pointed out that Keats and Shelley, more than Hunt, reaped the rewards of his revivification of the heroic couplet.

From Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats by Miller, Barnette

The virtues of blank verse are the virtues of rhythmic prose, which is still freer and more natural than blank verse, just as blank verse is preferable to the heroic couplet.

From The Literature of Ecstasy by Mordell, Albert

It likewise borrowed from France that garb of rhyme which the English drama had so long abandoned, and which now reappeared in the heroic couplet.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 7 "Drama" to "Dublin" by Various

In the couplet of Keats, and of a number of his successors, we have a really different measure from the "heroic couplet" proper.

From English Verse Specimens Illustrating its Principles and History by Alden, Raymond MacDonald