French alexandrine French alexandrine The French alexandrine () is a syllabic poetic meter of (nominally and typically) 12 syllables with a medial caesura dividing the line into two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each. It was the dominant long line of French poetry from the 17th through the 19th century, and influenced many other European literatures which developed alexandrines of their own. According to verse historian Mikhail Gasparov, the French alexandrine developed from the Ambrosian octosyllable, by gradually losing the final two syllables, then doubling this line in a syllabic context with phrasal stress rather than length as a marker. The earliest
Heroic verse Heroic verse Heroic verse consists of the rhymed iambic line or heroic couplet. The term is used in English exclusively. In ancient literature, heroic verse was synonymous with the dactylic hexameter. It was in this measure that those typically heroic poems, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" and the "Aeneid" were written. In English, however, it was not enough to designate a single line of iambic pentameter (an 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. In French the alexandrine has always been regarded