Heroic Couplet || Literary Term - Definition & Examples || Learning The Easy Way

Heroic Couplet:

Heroic Couplet is a pair of rhyming. It has IAMBIC PENTAMETER lines. It was the favorite  verse form  of eighteen-century neoclassical poets. At first, it was introduced by Geoffrey Chaucer. This couplet takes its name from its use in the heroic drama of john Dryden and the Mock Epic of Alexander pope.

For Examples:

A few line from pope's Essay on criticism will show the typical pattern of a complete thought every two lines:

Whatever Nature has in worth denied,

She gives in large recruits of needful pride,

For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find 

what wants in blood and spirits, Swelled with wind:

Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defense,

And fills up all the mighty void of sense.

If once right reason drives that cloud away,

Truth breaks upon us with resistless day.

Trust not yourself; But your defects to know,

Make use of very friend and every foe.