ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the relationship between the heroic couplet, chattel slavery, and capital accumulation. It refers to poems by Alexander Pope, Phillis Wheatley, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith, and Thom Gunn as it demonstrates how, beginning primarily in the eighteenth century, poets have used heroic couplets to engage with history. Pope’s use of the form to translate Homer, and Wheatley’s use of the form to defend Black
AU: ‘black’/’Black’ used in the text. Please confirm usage in all instances.
humanity leverage its “order and decorum” to create ennobling effects. The twentieth-century poets, meanwhile, deploy the historicity of the form for purposes of irony, pathos, and critique.
