Heroic verse

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The heroic verse ( English "heroic verse") is in the Verslehre a iambic pentameter fixed turning point after the second elevation . It is the English version of the French verse commun or the Italian hendecasyllable . An essential feature, however, is that the heroic verse occurs in rhyming form, mainly in pair rhymes to form the so-called heroic couplet ("heroic pair of rhymes").

In English, heroic verse or heroic meter generally refers to a meter that is worthy of taking the place of the heroic meter of antiquity, the (dactylic) hexameter , in a modern language such as English or French . For example, the Alexandrian is referred to in English literature as the French heroic meter . In this sense, John Dryden wrote in the preface to his Virgil translation in 1697:

"A Heroick Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable of performing. The design of it, is to form the Mind to Heroick Virtue by Example. "

As a specific term for the iambic five-lever handle, heroic verse appears to be linked to the English translations of ancient classics at the end of the 16th century and harbors a certain ambiguity. The objection to the alternative designations iambic pentameter ("iambic pentameter") or decasyllable is that they are incorrect, since the meter is not a pentameter in the sense of the ancient metron or the designation " ten silver " in English is inappropriate because that is the accentuating and not the syllable counting verse principle applies.

The following example of the specific use of the iambic five-key lever in rhyming pairs comes from the Canterbury Tales (original and modernized form) by Geoffrey Chaucer , who is credited with inventing this form in the 14th century:

Bi fil that in that se son, on a day ,
In South werk at the Ta bard as I lay
Re dy to wen den on my pil grym age
To Caun ter bury with ful de vout cor age

Befell that, in that season, on a day
In Southwark, at the Tabard, as I lay
Ready to start upon my pilgrimage
To Canterbury, full of devout homage

The form initially known as riding rhyme - probably with reference to the ride to Canterbury - did not become dominant immediately after Chaucer; it was not until the middle of the 16th century that it became the most widespread form in English poetry as heroic couplet, which is also used for epigrams and satires , as well as discursive as well as epic poetry was used. Their role was comparable to that of the hexameter in ancient epic or the elegiac distich in ancient epigram poetry. It was not until the end of the 18th century that the heroic verse was increasingly replaced by the (non-rhyming) blank verse .

One difference in the heroic couplet the open ( open ) and closed ( closed ) type, the closed type was characterized in that the turning point (usually male according to the fourth, rare female after the fifth syllable) and the Versschlüsse (the first verse or at the end of the pair of rhymes) match the syntactic structure, i.e. the end of the pair of rhymes usually coincides with the end of the sentence.

The change from the relatively free handling of Chaucer's rhymes to the structure of the closed form of the heroic couplet , which is strongly based on the ancient elegiac distichon, took place in a relatively short period of time at the end of the 16th century, when the Amores and Heroides of Ovid and the Epigrams of martials have been translated. An example from Christopher Marlowe's translation of the Amores shows the regular correspondence between verse form and syntactic structure or rhetorical structure (eg "If she ... / If not ..."):

If she be learned, then for her skill I crave her,
If not, because shees simple I would have her.
Before Callimachus one preferres me farre,
Seeing she likes my bookes, why should we jarre?
Another railes at me, and that I write,
Yet would I lie with her if that I might.
Trips she, it likes me well, plods she, what than?
She would be nimbler, lying with a man.

To compare the original Latin text:

Sive es docta, places raras dotata per artes;
Sive rudis, placita es simplicitate tua.
Est, quae Callimachi prae nostris rustica dicat
Carmina - cui placeo, protinus ipsa placet.
Est etiam, quae me vatem et mea carmina culpet -
Culpantis cupiam sustinuisse femur.
Molliter incedit - motu capit; altera dura est -
At poterit tacto mollior esse viro.

Significant poets who made use of the heroic couplet include:

From the romantic era onwards, freer forms of heroic verse were used by Lord Byron , John Keats ( Endymion , 1817/1818), Percy Shelley , Robert Browning ( My Last Duchess ) and Algernon Charles Swinburne . In American literature, Timothy Dwight IV should be mentioned with his extensive verse epic The Conquest of Canaan , published in 1785 . In German, the heroic pair of rhymes was reproduced in the satirical verses Justus Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariaes .

In the 20th century, the heroic couplet was finally still used by TS Eliot (a section in The Waste Land in heroic couplets was removed by him on the advice of Ezra Pounds ), Robert Frost (eg The Tuft of Flowers , 1906) and Alec Derwent Hope ( Dunciad Minor , 1970).

In addition to the heroic couplet , the heroic verse was also used in other rhyme and stanza forms: The chaucer stanza , also known as rhyme royal , is a stanza of seven heroic verses with the rhyme scheme ababbcc. Also of importance is the four-line stanza known as heroic stanza or heroic quatrain with the rhyme scheme abab, which was used by Dryden in the 16th and 17th centuries, for example, as elegiac stanza ("elegiac stanza") then by James Hammond ( Love elegies , 1743), Thomas Gray ( Elegy written in a country churchyard , 1750) and in other melancholic poems and the horror poetry of the group of English pre-Romanticism known as Graveyard Poets .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Canterbury Tales / General Prologue v. 19-23.
  2. ^ Diller: Metrics and Verslehre. Düsseldorf 1978, p. 109.
  3. ↑ Ovid Amores 2.4, v.17-24, online