Heroic Couplet

Question 1

Dobyns

Answer 1

‘this is the Age of Reason and the heroic couplet is the microcosmic model of that age’

Question 2

Hunter

Answer 2

‘writing and talking were closer in the C18th than they are today…texts were quoted and became part of public conversation’
‘poets felt themselves to be participating in the public sphere, not just commenting on it’
‘

Question 3

Hunter - C18th poetry and oral/print culture

Answer 3

‘the attempt to recreate in an age of print a new version of the conversational ideals of an earlier oral age…high standards for conversation’
Couplets as ‘conversational’, could be read ‘gracefully’ without ‘struggle over their strategic craft’

Question 4

Hunter - Rhyme in C18th

Answer 4

‘linking particular words and syntactic arrangements so as to call attention to particular word and phrase connections’
‘sometimes implying a kinship poets dare not assert directly’

Question 5

Hunter - ‘habits’

Answer 5

Couplet has ‘habits of concision, balance, and pointedness’; of ‘brevity and conciseness - the art of focusing quickly on the crucial issues’

Question 6

Doody

Answer 6

Couplet as a ‘flexible framework’

‘Following the significance of its rhymed relationships…is a pleasurable employment’

Question 7

Caplan - modern poets

Answer 7

Modern poets seem to believe that contemporary society is ‘too tumultuous’ for such a rigid form