heroic quatrain

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Related to heroic quatrain: elegy, Iambic pentameter

heroic quatrain

or heroic stanza

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Thus, Gray's Elegy solidified a conception of "elegy" and "elegiac" closely associated with the heroic quatrain in the eighteenth century.

The elegies, composed in what we now call heroic quatrains, rhyming abab, are erotic pastoral fantasies; as such, they defy our preconceptions of elegy solely as a thematic distinction, suggesting that the designation is, to a great extent, a formal one for eighteenth-century poets.

Elegiac Sonnets: Charlotte Smith's formal paradoxy

In mid-1537, while under a form of house-arrest at Windsor, Surrey invented the English sonnet form and heroic quatrain when he wrote of his sense of loss in Fitzroy's death and England's loss in the decay of its aristocracy.