It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid.
Several attempts were made in the 19th century to naturalise the dactylic hexameter to English — by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Arthur Hugh Clough, and others — none of them particularly successful.
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote many of his poems in six-foot iambic and sprung rhythm lines.
In the 20th century a loose ballad-like six-foot line with a strong medial pause was used by William Butler Yeats.
Albert Meyer [de] (1893–1962) used a natural form of hexameter in his translation of some verses from Homer's Odyssey into the Swiss dialect of Bern.