Heroic Couplet Analysis

While the class was given the option to write a research paper on a topic of their choice, the majority chose to do a creative project in place of the research paper. This gave the class the creativity to create a plethora of various types of projects such as a web page, a comic, or a poem. In this instance, I personally chose to create a poem in the form of a heroic couplet in response to Alexander Pope’s “Essay of Criticism”. Choosing to write a response in a poetic format was meant to be a recreation of Pope’s poem and to also challenge myself further with this project. Heroic couplets are used by Alexander Pope, which are a pair of rhyming iambic pentameters. The reason why I chose to do my creative piece on “Essay of Criticism” is because

One factor that caught my attention, and was mentioned in many of my sources, was the origins of the heroic couplet. The source that held the majority of information on heroic couplets was a book titled The Poetry of Allusion, written by Reuben Arthur Brower. In this book, Brower shows that Pope was a fan of Homer’s work and gained inspiration from him. The term ‘heroic couplet’ was inspired by the traditional oral epic, which. Pope’s public career as a translator of the Iliad began with his publishing a version of a speech he conducted in 1790 titled Rape of the Lock (Brower 85). Pope had ‘caught the itch of poetry’ from Homer, since he was considered ‘the first author’ and admired his work (85). Rape of the Lock is not the only piece of literature Pope created that is influenced by Homer and uses Homeric mode. In his translation Pope produced one of the classic examples f the mode and gave the eighteenth century the ‘Heroic Poem, truly such’ of which Dryden and too many poets dreamed, from Spenser to inglorious Blackmore, who unexpectedly attained immortality in Pope’s first Imitation of

Eliot and Dryden, people who like him have significantly extended and reinforced the theoretical elements implicated in their writing by their explicit published discussions of matters relating to criticism, and their analyses of the works of other writers (Dixon 250). Pope, in An Essay on Criticism, criticizes authors who ‘wou’d rather be admir’d than understood’, and sees the ‘ambition of surprising a reader’ as ‘the true natural cause of all Fustain, or Bombast in Poetry’, recommends ‘an easier and more unaffected expression’, and places majesty above sweetness (252).

He writes, and helps to write, indecent poetry and prose which offends the serious ideal of correctness, but rightly insists, when the authorship becomes known, that there is a distinction between work and play (Tillotson 7). The Essay on Criticism shows him abhorring the ‘correctly cold’, shows him ready to ‘snatch a grace beyond the reach of art. He believes, then and always, that:

Some beauties yet no Precepts can declare, For there’s a happiness as well as care…