Question

Dr. Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes is written in:

• A. Blank verse
• B. Heroic couplets with rhetorical formality
• C. Spenserian stanzas
• D. Ottava rima

Answer 1

Answer:

B. Heroic couplets with rhetorical formality

• Johnson followed Pope’s model of heroic couplets.

• Used personification and formal rhetoric typical of neo-classicism.

• The poem meditates on ambition, human limits, and fate.