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

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

heroic couplet

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 Barnette Miller

A study of the heroic couplet from Dryden to Shelley based on two hundred lines from each poet has yielded the results indicated in the table on the following page.

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

Like most of his contemporaries he shows at times a strange insensibility to smooth rhythm in the heroic couplet.

From Philip Massinger by A. H. Cruickshank

It is owing to this, in part, that the heroic couplet is so often required to give, in translation, the full value of a single Homeric hexameter.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 13, Slice 4 "Hero" to "Hindu Chronology" by Various

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