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Analyzing and Interpreting Literature / Unit 8   AIL 0735 short lesson, about 20 seconds

The Heroic Couplet

Captions available

The idea

A heroic couplet is a pair of rhyming iambic pentameter lines, the dominant vehicle of eighteenth-century English verse. The glossary defines neither it nor the couplet. Pope wrote in almost nothing else, so unit eighteen cannot proceed without the term.

In practice

Two rhyming five-beat lines.

Where people slip

The eighteenth century runs on this.

Your place on the trail

Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.

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