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in: Articles incorporating text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Poetic form

Heroic verse

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Heroic verse consists of the rhymed iambic line or heroic couplet. The term is used in English exclusively in modern time.

Classical heroic verse[]

In classical Latin and Ancient Greek literature, heroic verse was synonymous with the dactylic hexameter. It was in this measure that those typically heroic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey and the Aeneid were written.

In French the alexandrine has always been regarded as the heroic measure of that language. The dactylic movement of the heroic line in ancient Greek, the famous AvBbr rtpg5os of Homer, is expressed in modern Europe by the iambic movement. The consequence is that much of the rush and energy of the antique verse, which at vigorous moments was like the charge of a battalion, is lost. 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.

English heroic verse[]

In English, however, it was not sufficient to designate a single iambic line of 5 beats as heroic verse, because it was necessary to distinguish blank verse from the distich, which was formed by the heroic couplet. This had escaped the notice of Dryden, when he wrote "The English Verse, which we call Heroic, consists of no more than ten syllables." What Dryden should have said is "consists of two rhymed lines, each of ten syllables."

It is important to insist that it is the couplet, not the single line, that constitutes heroic verse. It is interesting to note that the Latin poet Ennius, as reported by Cicero, called the heroic meter of 1 line versum longum, to distinguish it from the brevity of lyrical measures.

14th and 15th centuries[]

The current form of English heroic verse appears to be the invention of Chaucer, who used it in Legend of Good Women and afterwards, with still greater freedom, in the Canterbury Tales. Here is an example of it in its earliest development:

And thus the lone day in fight they spend,
Till, at the last, as everything hath end,
Anton is shent, and put him to the flight,
And all his folk to go, as best go might."

This way of writing was misunderstood and neglected by Chaucer's English disciples, but was followed nearly a century later by the Scottish poet called Blind Harry (circa 1475), whose Wallace holds an important place in the history of versification as having passed on the tradition of the heroic couplet.

16th century[]

Another Scottish poet, Gavin Douglas, selected heroic verse for his translation of the Aeneid (1513), and displayed, in such examples as the following, a skill which left little room for improvement at the hands of later poets:

One sang, "The ship sails over the salt foam,
Will bring the merchants and my leman home";
Some other sings, "I will be blithe and light,
Mine heart is leant upon so goodly wight."

The verse so successfully mastered was, however, not very generally used for heroic purposes in Tudor literature. The early poets of the revival, and Spenser and Shakespeare after them, greatly preferred stanzaic forms. For dramatic purposes blank verse was almost exclusively used.

The closing years of the century did, though, see a great poem in heroic verse: Hero and Leander, begun by Christopher Marlowe and completed by George Chapman. Hero and Leander stands alone in its age, and far ahead of the work of any possible competitor between the death of Spenser and the dawn of Milton. In clear mastery of narrative and presentation, in melodious ease and simplicity of strength, it is not less pre-eminent than in the adorable beauty and impeccable perfection of separate lines or passages. It is doubtful whether the heroic couplet has ever been more finely handled.

17th century[]

In the earlier half of the 17th century, heroic verse was often put to somewhat unheroic purposes, mainly in prologues and epilogues, or other short poems of occasion; but it was nobly redeemed by by Browne in his Britannia's Pastorals. Those Elizabethans who, like Chapman, Warner and Drayton, aimed at producing a warlike and Homeric effect, however, did so in shambling fourteen-syllable couplets. The one heroic poem of that age written at considerable length in the appropriate national metre is the Bosworth Field of Sir Sir John Beaumont (1582-1628).

Since the middle of the 17th century, when heroic verse became the typical and for a while almost the solitary form in which serious English poetry was written, its history has known many vicissitudes. After having been the principal instrument of Dryden and

18th century[]

Pope

19th century[]

it was almost entirely rejected by Wordsworth and Coleridge, but revised, with various modifications, by Byron, Shelley (in Julian and Maddalo) and Keats (in Lamia). In the 2nd half of the 19th century its prestige was restored by the brilliant work of Swinburne in Tristram and elsewhere.

References[]

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