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Heroic Verse

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A term exclusively used in English to indicate the rhymed iambic line or Herdic Couplet. In ancient literature, the heroic verse, ipwercov µ Tpov, was synonymous with the dactylic hexameter. It was in this measure that those typically heroic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey and the Aeneid xIII. 13 were written. In English, however, it was not enough to designate a single iambic line of five beats as heroic verse, because it was necessary to distinguish blank verse from the distich, which was formed by the heroic couplet. This had escaped the notice of Dryden, when he wrote "The English Verse, which we call Heroic, consists of no more than ten syllables." If that were the case, then Paradise Lost would be written in heroic verse, which is not true. What Dryden should have said is "consists of two rhymed lines, each of ten syllables." In French the alexandrine has always been regarded as the heroic measure of that language. The dactylic movement of the heroic line in ancient Greek, the famous 1 50 /Las iipc30s of Homer, is expressed in modern Europe by the iambic movement. The consequence is that much of the rush and energy of the antique verse, which at vigorous moments was like the charge of a battalion, is lost. It is owing to this, in part, that the heroic couplet is so often required to give, in translation, the full value of a single Homeric hexameter. It is important to insist that it is the couplet, not the single line, which constitutes heroic verse. It is interesting to note that the Latin poet Ennius, as reported by Cicero, called the heroic metre of one line versum longum, to distinguish it from the brevity of lyrical measures. The current form of English heroic verse appears to be the invention of Chaucer, who used it in his Legend of Good Women and afterwards, with still greater freedom, in the Canterbury Tales. Here is an example of it in its earliest development: "And thus the longs day in fight they spend, Till, at the last, as everything hath end, Anton is shent, and put him to the flight, And all his folk to go, as best go might." This way of writing was misunderstood and neglected by Chaucer's English disciples, but was followed nearly a century later by the Scottish poet, called Blind Harry ( c. 1475), whose Wallace holds an important place in the history of versification as having passed on the tradition of the heroic couplet. Another Scottish poet, Gavin Douglas, selected heroic verse for his translation of the Aeneid (1513), and displayed, in such examples as the following, a skill which left little room for improvement at the hands of later poets: "One sang, ` The ship sails over the salt foam, Will bring the merchants and my leman home'; Some other sings, ` I will be blithe and light, Mine heart is leant upon so goodly wight.'" The verse so successfully mastered was, however, not very generally used for heroic purposes in Tudor literature. The early poets of the revival, and Spenser and Shakespeare after them, greatly preferred stanzaic forms. For dramatic purposes blank verse was almost exclusively used, although the French had adopted the rhymed alexandrine for their plays. In the earlier half of the 17th century, heroic verse was often put to somewhat unheroic purposes, mainly in prologues and epilogues, or other short poems of occasion; but it was nobly redeemed by Marlowe in his Hero and Leander and respectably by Browne in his Britannia's Pastorals. It is to be noted, however, that those Elizabethans who, like Chapman, Warner and Drayton, aimed at producing a warlike and Homeric effect, did so in shambling fourteen-syllable couplets. The one heroic poem of that age written at considerable length in the appropriate national metre is the Bosworth Field of Sir John Beaumont (1582-1628). Since the middle of the 17th century, when heroic verse became the typical and for a while almost the solitary form in which serious English poetry was written, its history has known many vicissitudes. After having been the principal instrument of Dryden and Pope, it was almost entirely rejected by Wordsworth and Coleridge, but revised, with various modifications, by Byron, Shelley (in Julian and Maddalo ) and Keats (in Lamia). In the second half of the 19th century its prestige was restored by the brilliant work of Swinburne in Tristram and elsewhere. (E. G.) Harold, Louis Joseph Ferdinand (1791-1833), French musician, the son of Francois Joseph Herold, an accomplished pianist, was born in Paris, on the 28th of January 1791. It was not till after his father's death that Herold in 1806 entered the Paris conservatoire, where he studied under Catal and Maul.

In 1812 he gained the grand prix de Rome with the cantata La Duchesse de la Valliere, and started for Italy, where he remained till 1815 and composed a symphony, a cantata and several pieces of chamber music. During his stay in Italy also Herold for the first time ventured on the stage with the opera La Gioventit di Enrico V., first performed at Naples in 1815 with moderate success. During a short stay in Vienna he was much in the society of Salieri. Returning to Paris he was invited by Boieldieu to collaborate with him on an opera called Charles de France, performed in 1816, and soon followed by Herold's first French opera, Les Rosieres (1817), which was received very favourably. Herold produced numerous dramatic works for the next fifteen years in rapid succession. Only the names of some of the more important need here be mentioned: La Clochette (1817), L'Auteur mort et vivant (1820), Marie (1826), and the ballets La Fille mal gardee (1828) and La Belle au bois dormant (1829). Herold also wrote a vast quantity of pianoforte music, in spite of his time being much occupied by his duties as accompanist at the Italian opera in Paris. In 1831 he produced the romantic opera Zampa, and in the following year Le Pre aux clercs (first performance December 15, 1832), in which French esprit and French chivalry find their most perfect embodiment. These two operas secured immortality for the name of the composer, who died on the 18th of January 1833, of the lung disease from which he had suffered for many years, and the effects of which he had accelerated by incessant work. Herold's incomplete opera Ludovic was afterwards printed by J. F. F. Halevy.