Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales,[1] and generally considered to have been perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the Restoration Age and early 18th century respectively.
Major poems in the closed couplet, apart from the works of Dryden and Pope, are Samuel Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes, Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, and John Keats's Lamia.
The looser type of couplet, with occasional enjambment, was one of the standard verse forms in medieval narrative poetry, largely because of the influence of the Canterbury Tales.
Her lofty courser, in the court below, Who his majestic rider seems to know, Proud of his purple trappings, paws the ground, And champs the golden bit, and spreads the foam around.
My Tyrians, at their injur’d queen’s command, Had toss’d their fires amid the Trojan band; At once extinguish’d all the faithless name; And I myself, in vengeance of my shame, Had fall’n upon the pile, to mend the fun’ral flame.