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What poetic form did Alexander Pope use in An Essay on Criticism?
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Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope, portrait by Thomas Hudson, c. 1739; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Alexander Pope wrote An Essay on Criticism using the heroic couplet poetic form.1
A heroic couplet consists of rhyming iambic pentameters that often function as a distinct rhetorical and metrical unit. Pope, who perfected this form alongside John Dryden, utilized the structure to present his Neoclassical maxims and brilliantly polished epigrams with great stylistic assurance.213