>For the Elizabethans that Simon Cauchi mentions, the heroic meter >is always a stanza of some kind . . .
Not always. Puttenham commends Phaer for translating Virgil into "English verse Heroicall", and Phaer wrote in couplets -- but they were fourteeners, not what Puttenham calls "the meeter of ten sillables" (which he also considered to be heroical). >My goal is to date the switch: when did "heroic verse" or "heroic meter" >become a synonym for "rhyming couplet"? Before such a phrase became synonymous with "rhyming couplet", must there not have been a time when the rhyming couplet was one of the verse-forms it could refer to, but not the only one? Trying to date the time when reference to other verse-forms became a negligible possibility is indeed rather a tall order. Moreover, by the time the terms had become synonyms (of a sort), the so-called "heroic couplet" was being used not only for epic verse but also for satire, elegy, epistle, and various other kinds of poetry. In short, I suspect there's a certain difficulty in the way your question is phrased, and I think the difficulty probably lies in that tricky word "synonym". Simon Cauchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
