Heroic couplet

A pair of rhyming iambic pentameter lines, often expressing a complete thought. Its balanced rhythm and rhyme make it a prominent form in English narrative and satirical poetry.

Iambic pentameter: A poetic meter consisting of five iambs, each typically an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. This meter supplies the characteristic five-beat line of the couplet.
Geoffrey Chaucer: A fourteenth-century English poet whose works include The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. His rhyming pentameter helped establish the couplet in English narrative poetry.
End-stopped line: A poetic line whose syntax reaches a pause or completion at its end. End-stopping reinforces the couplet’s paired rhyme and sense of completion.
The Rape of the Lock: Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem about a trivial social conflict among eighteenth-century aristocrats. Pope uses the form’s elegance and precision to heighten mock-heroic comedy.
Blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter used extensively in English drama and poetry. It shares the meter but omits the end rhyme that defines the couplet.
End rhyme: Rhyme between words at the ends of poetic lines. Matching line endings create the couplet’s defining sound pattern.
John Dryden: A seventeenth-century English poet, playwright, and critic who became England’s first Poet Laureate. His translations and poems made the heroic couplet a major vehicle for English verse.
Antithesis: A rhetorical figure that places contrasting ideas in balanced or parallel expression. A couplet’s two-line balance can sharpen oppositions into memorable statements.
An Essay on Criticism: Alexander Pope’s 1711 poem in which rhyming couplets present principles of literary criticism. Its quotable maxims show how couplets can compress an argument into memorable lines.
Terza rima: An interlocking three-line rhyme scheme, commonly arranged ABA BCB CDC. Its linked tercets replace the heroic couplet’s self-contained rhyming pairs.

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