Heroic verse is a term that may be used to designate epic poems, but which is more usually used to describe the meter(s) in which those poems are most typically written (regardless of whether the content is "heroic" or not). Because the meter typically used to narrate heroic deeds differs by language and even within language by period, the specific meaning of "heroic verse" is dependent upon context.
The oldest Greek verseform, [1] and the Greek line for heroic verse, is the dactylic hexameter, which was already well-established in the 9th and 8th centuries B.C.E. when the Iliad and Odyssey were composed in this meter. [2]
The Saturnian was used in Latin epics of the 3rd century B.C.E., but few examples remain and the meter is little understood. [3] Beginning at least with Ennius (239–169 B.C.E.) dactylic hexameter was introduced in imitation of the Greeks, [3] thereafter becoming the Latin heroic meter. [4]
The Greek/Roman dactylic hexameter exerted a huge influence over the subsequent poetic practice of much of Europe, whether by the new accentual verseforms it evolved into (as the medieval riming leonine verse), by attempts at reviving it either quantitatively or accentually (as by Alberti, Stanyhurst, Klopstock, Longfellow, Bridges, and many others), or simply as an ideal of what a nation's heroic verse should aspire to. [5]
Alliterative verse (as exemplified by Beowulf ) was the heroic verse of Old English, as, in several closely related forms, it was for all Germanic languages more or less during the first millennium C.E. [6]
Then that sorry soul suffered awhile,
most miserably, he who in murk lingered.
Alone he listened to the delight each day,
human happiness, the hall loud with glee;
sweet was the singing, sound of harping. [7]— Beowulf: An Imitative Translation, lines 86-90
The Alliterative Revival (mainly of the 14th century) likely constituted a continuation (though in evolved form) of the earlier tradition. [8] However, around 1380 [9] Geoffrey Chaucer developed the English iambic pentameter, based chiefly on the Italian endecasillabo [10] and composed chiefly in couplets or in rime royal. Although Chaucer's practice was largely preserved to the north by the Scottish Chaucerians (James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas [11] ), in England itself changes in pronunciation or taste soon rendered Chaucer's technique extinct, and iambic pentameter disappeared for over 100 years.
The practice in these years has been characterized as incompetent ("bad shambling heroics" [12] ), but alternatively as a distinct meter that embraces lines that qualify as well-formed iambic pentameter as well as others that don't. Jakob Schipper for example, laid out a 16-type pattern for "five-accent verse": [13]
(×) / × / (×) | (×) / × / × / (×) where /=accented syllable; ×=unaccented syllable; (×)=optional; and |=caesura
which he then further multiplied by allowing that sometimes the caesura could appear elsewhere (most commonly after the third accent): [14]
(×) / × / × / (×) | (×) / × / (×)
C. S. Lewis in fact denominated this verse the "fifteenth-century heroic" while both simplifying and broadening its metrical definition: a line with a sharp medial caesura, each resulting half-line having from 2 to 3 stresses, most hovering between 2 and 3. [15] Lewis exemplifies his conception of the "fifteenth-century heroic line" with this excerpt from The Assembly of Gods :
His shéte from his bódy | dówn he let fáll,
And ón a rèwde máner | he salútyd àll the róut,
Wíth a bóld vòyse | cárpying wórdÿs stóut.
Bút he spáke all hólow, | ás hit hád be óon
Had spóke in anóther wórld | þát had wóo begóon. [16] [lower-alpha 1]— Anonymous: Assembly of Gods lines 437-441
Iambic pentameter was re-developed by Wyatt and Surrey in the 1530s or 1540s. It was Surrey's line (modeled this time on the French vers de dix [17] ) as finessed by Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser that was re-embraced as English heroic verse. Using this line, Surrey also introduced blank verse into English, [18] previous instances being rimed.
A long exile thou art assigned to bere,
Long to furrow large space of stormy seas;
So shalt thou reach at last Hesperian land,
Wher Lidian Tiber with his gentle streme
Mildly doth flow along the frutfull felds. [19]— Surrey: Translations from the Æneid Book 2, lines 1035-1039
The fourteener vied with iambic pentameter as the English heroic verse [4] during the mid-16th-century, especially for translation from classical drama and narrative, notably: Jasper Heywood's translations of Seneca (1559-1561), Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1567), and George Chapman's Iliad (1598-1611). [20]
Achilles' banefull wrath resound, O Goddesse, that imposd
Infinite sorrowes on the Greeks, and many brave soules losd
From breasts Heroique—sent them farre, to that invisible cave
That no light comforts; and their lims to dogs and vultures gave. [21]— Chapman: Iliad Book 1, lines 1-4
However, landmark works like Gorboduc (1561), portions of The Mirror for Magistrates (1559-1610), Tamburlaine (c. 1587), Astrophel and Stella (1580s, published 1591), and The Faerie Queene (1590-1596), established the iambic pentameter—rimed for narrative and lyric and largely unrimed for drama—as the English heroic line.
The heroic couplet is a pair of iambic pentameter lines that rime together. Frequently, the term is associated with the balanced, closed couplets that dominated English verse from roughly 1640 to 1790, [22] [23] although the form dates back to Chaucer, and remains in use often in a looser form. John Denham exemplifies, and describes (while addressing the River Thames), the neoclassical closed heroic couplet:
Oh, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full. [24]— Denham: Cooper's Hill lines 189-192
The heroic quatrain (also "elegiac quatrain") is a stanza of iambic pentameter riming ABAB. [22]
In France the décasyllabe and alexandrine have taken turns as the language's heroic verseform: first, the décasyllabe appearing in the 11th century; then, around 1200 the alexandrine began its first period of dominance; however, by 1400 the décasyllabe had again been established as the French heroic verse, completely ousting the alexandrine. [25] The alexandrine, in a slightly stricter form, was resurrected in the middle of the 16th century by the poets of the Pléiade, [26] and has retained its status since then.
Nous partîmes cinq cents; | mais par un prompt renfort | As five hundred we left, | but soon we gained support: |
| —Corneille: Le Cid Act IV, scene 3, lines 1259-62 |
Alexandrine is a name used for several distinct types of verse line with related metrical structures, most of which are ultimately derived from the classical French alexandrine. The line's name derives from its use in the Medieval French Roman d'Alexandre of 1170, although it had already been used several decades earlier in Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne. The foundation of most alexandrines consists of two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each, separated by a caesura :
o o o o o o | o o o o o o o=any syllable; |=caesura
A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales, and generally considered to have been perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the Restoration Age and early 18th century respectively.
Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet. It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the Hymns of Orpheus. According to Greek mythology, hexameter was invented by Phemonoe, daughter of Apollo and the first Pythia of Delphi.
In poetry, metre or meter is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody.
The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590–96). Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is ABABBCBCC.
A caesura, also written cæsura and cesura, is a metrical pause or break in a verse where one phrase ends and another phrase begins. It may be expressed by a comma (,), a tick (✓), or two lines, either slashed (//) or upright (||). In time value, this break may vary between the slightest perception of silence all the way up to a full pause.
Rhyme royal is a rhyming stanza form that was introduced to English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer. The form enjoyed significant success in the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth century. It has had a more subdued but continuing influence on English verse in more recent centuries.
The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho, is an Aeolic verse form of four lines. Originally composed in quantitative verse and unrhymed, since the Middle Ages imitations of the form typically feature rhyme and accentual prosody. It is "the longest lived of the Classical lyric strophes in the West".
Syllabic verse is a poetic form having a fixed or constrained number of syllables per line, while stress, quantity, or tone play a distinctly secondary role — or no role at all — in the verse structure. It is common in languages that are syllable-timed, such as French or Finnish — as opposed to stress-timed languages such as English, in which accentual verse and accentual-syllabic verse are more common.
Scansion, or a system of scansion, is the method or practice of determining and (usually) graphically representing the metrical pattern of a line of verse. In classical poetry, these patterns are quantitative based on the different lengths of each syllable. In English poetry, they are based on the different levels of stress placed on each syllable. In both cases, the meter often has a regular foot. Over the years, many systems have been established to mark the scansion of a poem.
Iambic pentameter is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in each line. Rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called "feet". "Iambic" indicates that the type of foot used is the iamb, which in English is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. "Pentameter" indicates that each line has five "feet".
The Sicilian octave is a verse form consisting of eight lines of eleven syllables each, called a hendecasyllable. The form is common in late medieval Italian poetry. In English poetry, iambic pentameter is often used instead of syllabics. The form has a prescribed rhyme scheme (ABABABAB). Although only the final two rhymes are different from the much more common ottava rima, the two eight-line forms evolved completely separately. According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, scholars disagree on the origin of the Sicilian octave, but all agree that it is related to the development of the first eight lines of the sonnet. It is not clear whether the octave emerged first and influenced the sonnet or vice versa.
Decasyllable is a poetic meter of ten syllables used in poetic traditions of syllabic verse. In languages with a stress accent, it is the equivalent of pentameter with iambs or trochees.
This is a glossary of poetry terms.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to poetry:
A cretic is a metrical foot containing three syllables: long, short, long. In Greek poetry, lines made entirely of cretic feet are less common than other metres. An example is Alcman 58. However, any line mixing iambs and trochees could employ a cretic foot as a transition. In other words, a poetic line might have two iambs and two trochees, with a cretic foot in between.
Marina Tarlinskaja is a Russian-born American linguist specializing in the statistical analysis of verse.
Latin prosody is the study of Latin poetry and its laws of meter. The following article provides an overview of those laws as practised by Latin poets in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, with verses by Catullus, Horace, Virgil and Ovid as models. Except for the early Saturnian poetry, which may have been accentual, Latin poets borrowed all their verse forms from the Greeks, despite significant differences between the two languages.
Generative metrics is the collective term for three distinct theories of verse structure advanced between 1966 and 1977. Inspired largely by the example of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957) and Chomsky and Morris Halle's The Sound Pattern of English (1968), these theories aim principally at the formulation of explicit linguistic rules that will generate all possible well-formed instances of a given meter and exclude any that are not well-formed. T.V.F. Brogan notes that of the three theories, "[a]ll three have undergone major revision, so that each exists in two versions, the revised version being preferable to the original in every case."
The French alexandrine is a syllabic poetic metre of 12 syllables with a medial caesura dividing the line into two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each. It was the dominant long line of French poetry from the 17th through the 19th century, and influenced many other European literatures which developed alexandrines of their own.