heroic stanza

American  

noun

1. elegiac stanza.

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heroic stanza British  

noun

1. poetry a quatrain having the rhyme scheme a b a b

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Etymology

Origin of heroic stanza

First recorded in 1920–25

Example Sentences

Like most of his poems, it is written in an heroic stanza of six lines, and, as is not so common with him, is in dialogue form.

From The Bride by Potter, Alfred Claghorn

Saintsbury, on alexandrine, 258 f.; on Blair, 237; on Dryden's couplet, 194 f.; on Dryden's dactyls, 40; on heroic stanza, 73; on Shenstone, 35 f.; on Thomson, 238.

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

It is written in the four-line heroic stanza adopted ten years later by Sir John Davies for his Nosce teipsum, and most familiar to us all in Gray's Churchyard Elegy.

From Raleigh by Lang, Andrew

Shenstone, heroic stanza of, 73; Pastoral Ballad, 35*; Schoolmistress, 104.

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

The choriambic I thought might be exchanged for a heroic stanza, in which the first line should rhyme with the fourth, the second with the third, a kind of "In Memoriam" elongated.

From The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace by Conington, John