Heroic verse

The practice in these years has been characterized as incompetent ("bad shambling heroics"[12]), but alternatively as a distinct meter that embraces lines that qualify as well-formed iambic pentameter as well as others that don't.

[15] Lewis exemplifies his conception of the "fifteenth-century heroic line" with this excerpt from The Assembly of Gods: His shéte from his bódy | dówn he let fáll, And ón a rèwde máner | he salútyd àll the róut, Wíth a bóld vòyse | cárpying wórdÿs stóut.

Bút he spáke all hólow, | ás hit hád be óon Had spóke in anóther wórld | þát had wóo begóon.

It was Surrey's line (modeled this time on the French vers de dix[17]) as finessed by Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser that was re-embraced as English heroic verse.

[20] Achilles' banefull wrath resound, O Goddesse, that imposd Infinite sorrowes on the Greeks, and many brave soules losd From breasts Heroique—sent them farre, to that invisible cave That no light comforts; and their lims to dogs and vultures gave.

[21] 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.

John Denham exemplifies, and describes (while addressing the River Thames), the neoclassical closed heroic couplet: Oh, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme!