Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Why Not the Heroic Couplet?

1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nlh.1999.0003

1080-661X

David Caplan,

Giambattista Vico and Joyce

Why Not the Heroic Couplet?* David Caplan (bio) If the contemporary heroic couplet were a character in a fairy tale, she would be the ugly stepsister, ignored by the suitors who rush to her more attractive companions: the villanelle, pantoum, and sestina. While poets lavish attention on these more complicated forms, the heroic couplet, the mainstay of English verse for two hundred years, works hard to catch a stranger’s eye. Contemporary poets find the form so unattractive that it merits no entry in the glossary of terms and forms in David Lehman’s anthology, Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 85 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems. 1 After all, a reader who can not identify the heroic couplet will not miss much. Not one of the eighty-five leading poets offers an example of this form. Beyond the anthology, these days all the heroic couplet seems good for is translation, light verse, and, most frequently, parody. A possible explanation for this neglect is that the contemporary ear finds close repetitions of rhyme to be grating or just plain silly. However, start scanning your FM radio and you will hear an impressive variety of songs written in non-metrical rhyming pairs. Genres as different as Gangsta Rap and Easy Listening, Top 40 and Punk, R & B and Country and Western, all share a fondness for this form. Finally, with a deft rhyme millions of Americans learned in a single day, Johnnie Cochran demonstrated that the rhyming couplet has lost little of its mnemonic power. Indeed, “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit” proved to be nothing if not rhetorically persuasive. In John Berryman’s dramatic monologue “A Professor’s Song,” an overbearing academic announces to his class, “Let me tell you how / The Eighteenth Century couplet ended. Now / Tell me.” 2 The answers the tenured bore looks for are familiar enough to be clichés: Coleridge’s “organic form,” a few key phrases from the Lyrical Ballads’ Preface, and Arnold’s dismissal of Dryden and Pope as “classics of our prose.” Instead of retreading this well-travelled ground, I wish to discuss a less familiar question: as other received forms are taken up with gusto, why does the late twentieth-century heroic couplet never really begin? Since the heroic couplet, unlike Cochran’s and Garth Brooks’s non-metrical rhymes, is a literary form, answers to this question might arise from an investigation of how literary history or, more precisely, literary [End Page 221] histories, are written and received. To this end, I will review the vast difference between criticism of the heroic couplet offered by eighteenth-century specialists and creative-writing professionals—a contrast so stark that it transcends the local issue of this particular verse form. I also will examine a few examples of that rara avis, the contemporary poem in heroic couplets, in order to suggest the form’s diverse possibilities. Just as the heroic couplet’s lengthy history should not be reduced to the single figure of Alexander Pope, the contemporary couplet’s surprisingly wide range of possibilities needs to be acknowledged. However, I will devote a substantial portion of this essay to considering what the heroic couplet’s general neglect tells us about the current poetry scene and, more particularly, the academic divisions between “creative” and “scholarly” work. In the midst of what some call “revivals of traditional technique,” 3 what does the relative indifference to such a “traditional” technique reveal about the academic training almost all poets and readers of poetry receive? If the choice of poetic form is a complex constellation of aesthetic, ideological, and cultural concerns, what does the decision not to write couplets tell us about how poetry is written, analyzed, and taught? What We Talk about When We Talk about the Heroic Couplet One of the [English major] requirements was a course on the eighteenth century. I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead on reason. So I skipped it. Sylvia Plath 4 It is a striking fact that a reader of contemporary literature sees more poems about heroic couplets than in...