syllable; ×=unaccented syllable; (×)=optional; and |=caesura which he then further multiplied by allowing that sometimes the caesura could appear elsewhere (most commonly after the third accent): (×) / × / × / (×) | (×) / × / (×) C. S. Lewis in fact denominated this verse the "fifteenth-century heroic" while both simplifying and broadening its metrical definition: a line with a sharp medial caesura, each resulting half-line having from 2 to 3 stresses, most hovering between 2 and 3. Lewis exemplifies his conception of the "fifteenth-century heroic line" with this excerpt from The Assembly of Gods: Iambic pentameter was re-developed by Wyatt and Surrey in the 1530s or 1540s. It was Surrey's line (modeled this time on the French vers de dix) as finessed by Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser that was re-embraced as English heroic verse. Using this line, Surrey also introduced blank verse into English, previous instances being rimed. The fourteener vied with iambic pentameter as the English heroic verse during the mid-16th-century, especially for translation from classical drama and narrative, notably: Jasper Heywood's translations of Seneca (1559-1561), Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1567), and George Chapman's Iliad (1598-1611). However, landmark works like Gorboduc (1561), portions of The Mirror for Magistrates (1559-1610), Tamburlaine (c. 1587), Astrophel and Stella (1580s, published 1591), and The Faerie Queene (1590-1596), established the iambic pentameter—rimed for narrative and lyric and largely unrimed for drama—as the English heroic line. The heroic couplet is a pair of iambic pentameter lines that rime together. Frequently, the term is associated with the balanced, closed couplets that dominated English verse from roughly 1640 to 1790, although the form dates back to Chaucer, and remains in use often in a looser form. John Denham exemplifies, and describes (while addressing the River Thames), the neoclassical closed heroic couplet: The heroic quatrain (also "elegiac quatrain") is a stanza of iambic pentameter riming ABAB. French In France the décasyllabe and alexandrine have taken turns as the language's heroic verseform: first, the appearing in the 11th century; then, around 1200 the alexandrine began its first period of dominance; however, by 1400 the had again been established as the French heroic verse, completely ousting the alexandrine. The alexandrine, in a slightly stricter form, was resurrected in the middle of the 16th century by the poets of the Pléiade, and has retained its status since then. Notes and references Notes References Sources Further