In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, David
Wilson-Okamura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
At 05:30 PM 8/11/2004 +0100, you wrote:
There are some reasonably convincing remarks about the rise of the form, if
not as I recall the name, in heroic literature in Ruth C Wallerstein, 'The
Development of the Rhetoric and Metre of the Heroic Couplet 1625-45' PML 50
(1935), 160ish
It was actually Wallerstein that put me onto this. Wallerstein was Piper's
teacher, and she argued that the heroic couplet so-called was originally
devised as an equivalent for the Latin elegiac couplet -- not heroic at
all. Piper confirmed this. But you see where my question is going: when did
something that was originally used for translating elegies and epigrams
become the de facto meter for epic?
There was another possibility: blank verse, with its capacity for
constructing paragraphs in the Vergilian manner, as demonstrated by
Milton, again citing Italian precedent. But Dryden rejected this: how
far was this due to the new French aesthetic (which not only privileged
the couplet, but required clear demarcation of line-ends) and how far
(without admission) to Milton's outdated and undesirable views on
religion and politics?
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
--
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ
tel. +44 (0)1865 552808(home)/353865(work) fax +44 (0)1865 512237
email:
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