In a message dated 8/25/2010 5:47:32 PM Central Daylight Time, glipon@INNERLEA.COM writes:
On Aug 25, 2010, at 11:40 AM, Hyman, Eric wrote:
Neither Browning nor Shade’s verse is heroic couplets (as some say), because of that enjambment,
and Chaucer too?
Purists would contend that true heroic couplets must be end-stopped in the manner of Dryden, Pope, and many other poets of that time. But the term usually denotes just the form--rhymed pairs of pentameters. Enjambment has varied from poet to poet--Keats, Byron, and Browning often enjamb fairly radically, as did Lowell. Shade enjambs quite a bit, but generally his units of thought work out in two-line pairs. Not always, though. Frost's lovely "The Tuft of Flowers" breaks the couplets (with white space) into separate stanzas.
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