> Maybe I should start over and say I'm looking for early occurrences of the > phrase "heroic couplet." If Randi Eldevik is right and it doesn't come in > before Pope, that would be interesting.
Though it does not answer your specific question,you will probably have seen William Bowman Piper's entry on the heroic couplet in 'The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics' (1993). This makes many of the points in other replies to your original query and gives a list of references which might have the information you want. There is also a good heroic couplet bibliography here (which, again, you have probably seen): http://depts.washington.edu/versif/resources/pdf/E6.PDF Patrick Roper ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
