Colin Burrow
Wed, 11 Aug 2004 10:09:41 -0700
I'm afraid I don't know the answer to this question, though I'm sure I should. I suspect that it is indeed the case that the term 'heroic couplet' is surprisingly late, and that that has something to do with the history of the word 'couplet'. So if you do a free text search in the OED on 'couplet' many of the usages before 1800 suggest that the word connoted triviality, 'posies' or the like. For that reason I suspect 'heroic verse' and so on were preferred. There are some reasonably convincing remarks about the rise of the form, if not as I recall the name, in heroic literature in Ruth C Wallerstein, 'The Development of the Rhetoric and Metre of the Heroic Couplet 1625-45' PML 50 (1935), 160ish Colin Burrow Reader in Renaissance and Comparative Literature and Director of Studies in English, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge CB2 1TA 01223 332483 [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> www.english.cam.ac.uk/faculty/cburrow/index.htm -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of David Wilson-Okamura Sent: 09 August 2004 16:35 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: VIRGIL: heroic verse The virus-catchers seem to have caught up with [EMAIL PROTECTED] and we are back online. Thank you for being patient. A question, then. For the last few years, I have been reading and writing about epic style in the Renaissance. For someone who was trying to imitate Virgil's epic style in a vernacular language, the first question was which meter to use: dactylic hexameter, blank verse, couplets, or stanzas? This also applied to translations. My question is this: when did critics and poets start using the term "heroic couplet"? The online OED, which lets you search quotations, does not have an example of this phrase until 1857! As early as 1693, Dryden is using the phrase "heroic verse," but this is still very late, and he doesn't write as if the term were a new one. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina University Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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