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Canon 63it must then be granted, rhyme has all the advantages of prosebesides its own. […] where the poet commonly confines his sense tohis couplet, [he] must contrive that sense into such words that therhyme shall naturally follow them, not they the rhyme.(Dryden 1962:8)Denham’s work was canonized by later writers because his use of thecouplet made his poetry and poetry translations read “naturally andeasily” and therefore seem “majestic,” in an appropriately royalmetaphor, or “more right,” more accurate or faithful as translations—but only because the illusion of transparency concealed the process ofnaturalizing the foreign text in an English cultural and socialsituation. The ascendancy of the heroic couplet from the lateseventeenth century on has frequently been explained in politicalterms, wherein the couplet is viewed as a cultural form whose markedsense of antithesis and closure reflects a political conservatism,support for the restored monarchy and for aristocratic domination—despite the continuing class divisions that had erupted in civil warsand fragmented the aristocracy into factions, some more accepting ofbourgeois social practices than others. Robin Grove is particularlysensitive to the social implications of the discursive “flow” sought bythe writers who championed the couplet: “The urbanity of the style,”he observed,incorporates the reader as a member of the urbanely-responsiveclass. […] literature announces itself as a social act, even as the‘society’ it conjures around it is an increasingly specialized/stratified fiction: a fiction which indeed relates to historical fact(provided we don’t just coagulate the two), but for whose purposesthe ideas of Sense, Ease, Naturalness (cf. An Essay on Criticism, 68–140) contained a rich alluvial deposit of aspirations and meaningslargely hidden from view.(Grove 1984:54) 8The fact that for us today no form better than the couplet epitomizesthe artificial use of language bears witness, not just to how deeplytransparency was engrained in aristocratic literary culture, but also tohow much it could conceal.It is Dryden in particular who found Denham’s translation of Virgilso important for the rise of this cultural discourse. In the “Dedicationof the Æneis,” he stated that “’tis the utmost of my Ambition to be