heroic stanza

In 1751, Thomas Gray published "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", composed in the heroic stanza.

The decasyllabic quatrain with an alternating rhyme scheme is often referred to as the "heroic quatrain", the "heroic stanza" or the "four-line stave".

Other writers of Gray's time also wrote heroic stanzas about topics similar to those in Elegy, such as Thomas Warton in Pleasures of Melancholy and William Collins in Ode to Evening.

The heroic stanza or elegiac stanza (iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB or AABB; from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard")

The allegorical poem represents the soul led by divine grace and her guardian angel through the various temptations and assaults of life into her eternal felicity; it is written in a six-line heroic stanza, and contains, in its abridged form, 30,000 lines.