The heroic couplet

Yvor Winters has a very famous defense of the heroic couplet in his mammoth collection In Defense of Reason. I'm inclined to agree with nearly all of its conclusions, though not with the vengeful sort of impulse that leads Winters to them (and often takes him further into more absurd generalizations). This is understandable though, since even if wasn't a consequence of his particularly vengeful poetics, which tried to undo years of a particularly expressionist or expressivist (what he loves to call "Romantic") view of the role of poetry and literature by valorizing an austere hyper-rationalism, the heroic couplet had been so crapped upon over the years by so many insensitive people that some retribution was due. What's really great and still shocking, though, is that Winters focuses his argument by pitting the couplet aganst blank verse:

The heroic couplet must have certain qualities which enable the poet employing it to pass easily from description, to lyricism, to didacticism, to satire, and so on, or even at times to combine several of these qualities at a single stroke. It is doubtful whether so much freedom is possible in blank verse; the only satirical poet who has employed blank verse with major success is Ben Jonson, and much of his satire depends upon significance derived from the structure of the play--the details from line to line are usually variations upon an anterior theme rather than autonomous summaries.
-In Defense of Reason, 141

You have to appreciate that poet-critic sense of there being a stake in various verse forms, such that the fate of poetry itself seems to be in the triumph of one form over another. Though I've expressed annoyance with the sort of overzealousness of poet-critics when they get on such a track as this in the past, you can't at all blame them here, when the issue is form; and critics actually can only benefit from trying to feel things more intensely in this way (as long as they don't, like poet-critics, start turning the focus of criticism away from interpretation and towards manifesto-writing: that's how you get theory). But I say this as if critics weren't this impassioned already: most good ones are, because they have a deep, nuanced sense of form and know the significance of shifts in form throughout literary history.

Of course, everything about Winters' argument turns on his equivocating about "freedom" when he says: "It is doubtful whether so much freedom is possible in blank verse." Later, he will say that he means by freedom what we usually take to be its opposite. But if we agree that there is some sense in which freedom in general includes ease in passing between the functions Winters enumerates (description, lyricism, didacticism, satire, etc.), it's very true that the heroic couplet actually has more freedom here than blank verse.

This is because what matters in blank verse is argument. Now, argument means much more than we tend to think it does in all sorts of verse forms, or subordinates more elements to its elaboration than we--who have a very un- or anti-didactic sense of the role of literature--are usually willing to grant. But blank verse takes this to the max, because without the unity of the line, it needs higher semantic connection or a tighter syntactic arrangement. At the same time, this grammatical demand actually allows nearly any rhetorical possibility to be deployed: rather than fall back on just a few--heroic verse notably squeezes everything it can get out of parallelism, chiasmus, zeugma, and the simile, because it isn't quite capacious enough to admit any other figures--the whole canon of rhetoric is open to blank verse, and can vary them with ease. Also, because the line is stable, but not confining, new areas of interplay between meter and sense open up that are less concerned with reinforcement and more with pure rhythm. All of this explains why Milton is so much better at blank verse than Wordsworth, though the latter has more nuanced sense of the line itself and everything it can do: each speech, each narrative bit of Paradise Lost is masterfully put together as an argument and advances the argument of the whole, and this is what drives the verse along and wins you over to its movements.   In Wordsworth, the more reflective and lyric turn of the verse does not lend itself to such clarity of argument, and the principled resistance of Wordsworth to the classical canon of rhetoric--his immense privileging of certain tropes over others, which reorients rhetoric immensely--does not allow such full-on deployment of all linguistic possibilities. Only in meter does Wordsworth perhaps excel Milton as far as blank verse goes: whenever he wants to, he can easily pull off the contrapuntal effects which are the most spectacular sign of Milton's utter mastery of prosody, and complete exploitation of all the freedom of the open line--but he has such a nuanced sense of the role of rhythm (despite his rather flat theoretical presentation of it) that he can subordinate it to a timing which works on scales Milton (if only because of the novelty of his work) could not go down.

The point though, is that all of this can't happen in the heroic couplet--and that, really, this isn't a problem. For there are downsides to having the argument so much at the fore, and upsides to having a less strained relation between it and the verse form. Since in blank verse we are suddenly dealing with structures that extend over huge amounts of lines, and that suddenly become juxtaposed to the slightest variation in meter, the turns in the language, the points of pressure, become at once larger in scale and smaller than they were. This is wonderful if everything is connected via argument--we've seen what Wordsworth can do when these larger scales are exploited, and Milton most definitely plays with the smaller ones--but where argument now fills things in and connects, there was a very tight, well-fitting scale already established. And the heroic couplet takes advantage of nearly everything at this scale--which is, if not all of rhetoric, certainly most of rhetoric as well as all the tightest relations between rhyme, sense, and meter. So if we start to think of freedom in terms of a certain right-sizedness, being in the sweet spot which allows one to deftly switch between all these techniques of versification, we can see heroic couplet doesn't seem rigid or inflexible at all. Thus, Winters continues:

Ben Jonson himself employed the heroic couplet in some of his shorter poems, when he wished to indulge in a more direct and concentrated attack, and with remarkable vigor, in spite of the roughness of his versification. As a didactic instrument, blank verse is comparatively heavy and comparatively incapable of epigrammatic point; as a lyrical instrument, the range of blank verse, though wide, tends to be more closely limited to the grandiloquent and is less capable (in spite of charming passages in Fletcher and of Tears Idle Tears) of approaching the flexibility and variety of song. The heroic couplet, all things considered, appears to be the most flexible of forms: it can suggest by discreet imitation, the effects of nearly any other technique conceivable; it can contain all of these effects, if need be, in a single poem.
-In Defense of Reason, 141

You see, that's a bit strained, since whenever you read a heroic couplet you find it can very, very easily become monotonous (too regular) or, when it turns epigrammatic, too forced (too irregular). And then the comparison to blank verse becomes comical, since you'll find none of that there (the threat in blank verse, of course, is the prosaic, and even Milton falls into this sometimes). But Winters has certain very amazing possibilities of the couplet in mind, like the following, which he quotes:


No, no, poor suff’ring Heart, no Change endeavour,
Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her;
My ravish’d eyes behold such charms about her,
I can die with her, but not live without her:
One tender Sigh of hers to see me languish,
Will more than pay the price of my past anguish:
Beware, O cruel Fair, how you smile on me,
’Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me.

This is Dryden's very famous "One Happy Moment," and Winters is thinking about how, with the feminine ending here and the internal rhyme at the caesura, the thing turns into a song meter (see In Defense of Reason, 135-6).

But what's more telling to me is that he turns precisely to Dryden in making such a case for the heroic couplet against its strongest possible antagonist, blank verse, even though he thinks it just can't get any better than the more regular, consistent Pope:

Pope through the concentration of his entire forces upon a single method achieves a greater range in certain individual poems than Dryden ever achieves in a single poem. [...] Pope, in combining a comparable diversity into a single complexity, varies the couplet noticeably less than does Dryden; yet he is successful, and to the reader familiar with his sensibility he is one of the most exquisitely finished, as well as one of the most profoundly moving, poets in English.
-In Defense of Reason, 138

Given this, even though we might wonder why Pope couldn't be used to make the argument against blank verse, it's no surprise that after saying heroic couplets can contain"the effects of nearly any other technique conceivable [...] if need be, in a single poem," above, he gives up Dryden, and goes on to make the case for the intrinsic virtues of the couplet by hitting the point home with reference to "Popian balance":

What, then, makes the couplet so flexible? The answer can be given briefly: its seeming inflexibility. That is, the identity of the line is stronger in rhymed verse than in unrhymed, because a bell is rung at the end of every second line; the identity of the line will be stronger in the couplet than in any other stanza because the couplet is the simplest and most obvious form of stanza possible. [...] The poet may move in any direction whatever, and his movement will be almost automatically graduated by the metronomic undercurrent of regularity; and if he chooses at certain times to devote himself to prosaic explanation, the metronome and the Popian balance, emerging naked, are capable of giving his prose an incisiveness possible in no other form, and of maintaining the relationship of the didacticism to the rest of the poem--the relationship in regard to feeling, I mean, for a didactic passage would of necessity represent by explicit statement the rational relationships within the poem.
-In Defense of Reason, 142

This I think is a little too far, and is redolent of the minimalist excesses of Paul de Man, fascinated as both are with the automatic and mechanical. The bell is important, though, and even if things seem forced, Winters makes a lot of sense of it--if, that is, we read him a little against the grain and really understand that by the bell, he means not only rhyme but everything epigrammatic or everything involved in a concentrated turn in poetry, which rhyme so wonderfully helps out. This is what connects the bell to the argument about the identity of the line, more than the fact that this is the smallest stanza form.

Focusing on size and issues of regularity and automaticity instead leads him to say something which has to be one of the greatest little phrases I've read in criticism, but which seems a bit ridiculous:

A longer stanza is likely to be tyrannical.
-In Defense of Reason, 142

What follows is an interesting discussion of Spenser which justifies the statement more, so don't think it too ridiculous: my aim is only to show how committed Winters is to certain strands of his argument, rather than the one he should be following. He could have made a better case if he would have simply continued the argument against blank verse, for some people would say it is in blank verse that the identity of the line is strongest: shorn of all rhyme, it simply sits there, and rather than seeming like a part of the whole, it stands out all the more for remaining taut and internally unified. The argument here, if it would have admitted more of a role for the turn that rhyme itself gives verse, would have revealed this as a weak attempt to cover up the fact that the blank verse line is, essentially, not even a part, but a fragment, relying too much on meter. But that also would take Winters beyond the rigorous couplet of Pope back to the looser, more fanciful couplet of Dryden, who is willing often to extend a couplet into a triplet, or use amazing and absolutely unexpected rhymes and variations between rhymes. The form wouldn't be as pure.

But this, I think, should recommend Dryden all the more as the true hero of the heroic couplet, saving the form from the most vicious attacks: indeed, if we wanted to extend the argument more, we'd cite the fact that Dryden watched Milton very closely, and clearly thought his translations were a way of rivalling Milton, though they couldn't be original works of his own genius in the same sense. There's just nothing like the relaxed nimbleness of Dryden, the combination of a confident, strong line with the ability to make it fold and reform around the most playful thought. And if this isn't accomplished always by the most taut, tensed, controlled version of the form, the form in Dryden provokes it, which I think is more important than whether it is pure or not. The thing is just sheer fun, in a sense which the work and even play of Pope can't approach.

Especially when Pope is are understood as automatic, and this is the point at which we have to remember that, unlike Winters, the fact that Pope doesn't approach Dryden in this particular respect doesn't actually argue against him. For if I think that Dryden's example can defend the couplet better than Pope's, I mean only that: it does not imply that Dryden actually has a purer couplet, as Winters does with Pope. The idea that the purest form makes the best, least vulnerable model presupposes a lot about form itself that is pretty dubious, and shows us that questions about the vitality of a particular form in the end need to be posed differently and in a more historical manner: concerned with vitality, we can easily go beyond passionately delineating what a form can do when compared to another form, and, like Winters, start comparing versions of the same thing in some weird search to find the form itself. Such an effort ultimately to make us feel the weight of the form's accessibility--or, more likely, its inaccessibility--as if we ourselves could simply take it up again. Not that we can't: it's just that this will be more complex, more social and more historical venture than the effort (even given that Winters pursues it with more consciousness of the social and historical role of poetry than most) would make it seem.

In short, we shouldn't think of Pope as purer than Dryden, or Dryden as purer than Pope. Rather, we should say that Pope just has a certain inventiveness that works on a different level than Dryden, and accomplishes different things. Dryden seems to me to indeed remain more committed to the individual line, and experiments more than Pope with metrical possibilities--in the sense that Pope has too capatious an understanding of them all not to explore one without a point, just for sheer fun, and never with that happy sort of ignorance as to how it will come out. He thus actually works at the expense of the heroic couplet as a couplet sometimes. Pope, on the other hand works continually to display and reinforce masterfully chosen diction, to hit home something almost too clearly. And so when he uses the couplet, he is much more within it, exploring its ability to vary and indeed balance: one might say he thinks more in the couplet, distributing ideas and words with precision. It is from this that Pope's poise and balance comes, not from regularity.