The True Fountainheads of English Heroic Verse : Satires of Barclay and Spenser(Kansai English Studies)

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  • ヒロイック・カプレットの来た道 : バークレイとスペンサーの諷刺詩(関西英文学研究)
  • ヒロイック・カプレットの来た道 : バークレイとスペンサーの諷刺詩
  • ヒロイック ・ カプレット ノ キタ ミチ : バークレイ ト スペンサー ノ フウシシ

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The sixteenth century witnessed the burgeoning of literary nationalism among English poets, who, fuelled by a complex literary consciousness, experimented with diverse forms and metrics. The heroic couplet--a sequence of paires of rhyming iambic pentameter lines--was one of three forms that survived this experimentation, the other two being the sonnet and the blank verse. This study explores the embryonic development of the heroic couplet in sixteenth century England, which was to become the principal form used in Augustan poetry. As a literary term, the phrase 'heroic couplet' was coined only as late as the nineteenth century; as a form, though, it is alleged to have been used first by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales. However, Chaucer did not seem to seriously utilize the full satirical potential of this form; instead, he appears to have been rather careless about the consistency of a couplet and a semantic unit. It was Alexander Barclay and Edmund Spenser who used the heroic couplet to its full potential, as did the Augustan poets. Barclay was the first English pastoral poet and the earliest user of the heroic couplet in the sixteenth century. After a period of disuse, it was Spenser, with his Mother Hubbards Tale, who revived the heroic couplet and struck the first note of satire in that form. Importantly, both of them used the closed heroic couplet for court satires. It was here that they exploited the full potential of its metrical and rhythmical possibilities, such as the two-three division of five feet of a line to generate a comical effect, the repetition and contrast between two rhyming lines or between the two parts within a line, and he insertion of the six-foot punch line. Although Spenser was less rigid than Barclay in following the basic pattern, both the poets can rightly be referred to as the true fountainheads of English heroic verse.

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