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- In literature, a pair of lines of verse,
- usually of the same length and rhymed. The
- heroic couplet, consisting of two rhymed
- lines in iambic pentameter, was widely
- adopted for epic poetry, and was a convention
- of both serious and mock-heroic 18th-century
- English poetry, as in the work of Alexander
- Pope. An example, from Pope's An Essay on
- Criticism, is: `A little learning is a
- dang'rous thing;/Drink deep, or taste not the
- Pierian spring'.
-