Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on texts and titles
- Introduction
- Part I Voice
- Chapter 1 Voice in eighteenth-century poetry
- Chapter 2 The heroic couplet continuum
- Chapter 3 Vocal engagement: reading Pope’s An Essay on Criticism
- Chapter 4 Talking in tetrameter
- Chapter 5 Blank verse and stanzaic poetry
- Part II Poetic consciousness
- Part III Vision
- A concluding note: then and now
- Notes
- Further reading
- Index
Chapter 2 - The heroic couplet continuum
from Part I - Voice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on texts and titles
- Introduction
- Part I Voice
- Chapter 1 Voice in eighteenth-century poetry
- Chapter 2 The heroic couplet continuum
- Chapter 3 Vocal engagement: reading Pope’s An Essay on Criticism
- Chapter 4 Talking in tetrameter
- Chapter 5 Blank verse and stanzaic poetry
- Part II Poetic consciousness
- Part III Vision
- A concluding note: then and now
- Notes
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
Many readers firmly associate eighteenth-century poetry with couplets, as did Plath’s Esther Greenwood, and especially with those pairs of iambic pentameter lines known as “heroic couplets.” Even readers well aware of other verse forms in the period tend to think of the heroic couplet as the age’s emblem. This tendency bears examination since the pentameter couplet has been one of the most common poetic forms in English, from Chaucer into the nineteenth century. It made several appearances in the twentieth century and not only, as we might assume, in witty epigrams or light verse. Here are the opening, wistful lines of Robert Frost’s The Tuft of Flowers, from his first book, A Boy’s Will (1915):
I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone …
Frost’s are not the sort of lines brought to mind by the phrase “The Age of Pope.” Nor are these lines, from Browning:
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Frà Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first …
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- The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry , pp. 16 - 33Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011