The Heroic Couplet

Dust jacket notes: "The Heroic Couplet is the first full-scale exploration of a form that dominated English poetry for two centuries. Virtually every English poet who wrote between 1585 and 1785, including Shakespeare and Milton, used the heroic couplet. It was the favorite measure of John Donne, who wrote nearly as much of his poetry in heroic couplets as in all other forms combined, and of Ben Jonson, who called heroic couplets 'the bravest sort of verses.' In the first part of the study, 'A Brief History,' Dr. Piper places the heroic couplet within the historical context of English poetry and describes its progress in some detail. he discusses the influence of the Latin elegiac distich upon Elizabethan writers, its transformation at their hands into the closed heroic couplet, and the remarkable uses to which English poets put this elegiac adaptation. he demonstrates the importance of Sandys, Waller, Falkland, Denham, and Cowley for the development of the closed couplet and examines the great and central achievements of Dryden and Pope. In 'Essays and Illustrations,' the second part of the book, the author offers separate analyses of more than forty poets, from Chaucer to Keats, furnishing illustrative examples of the work of the more obscure among these poets. In his consideration of individual couplet poets, and of the couplet generally, Dr. Piper pays special attention to the interrelationship between style and meaning. He indicates, for instance, how Dryden's oratorical tone and great couplet paragraphs suited his political intentions, and how Pope's conversational and epigrammatic style suited his polite social concerns. The Heroic Couplet, then, is a wide-ranging survey (spanning a 400-year period) of the technical development of the form, and a detailed analysis of the separate technical practices of the great couplet poets...."