[4] Terza rima was invented early in the fourteenth century by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri for his narrative poem the Divine Comedy, which he set in hendecasyllabic lines.
[6] Terza rima can lend a sense of strength and solidity to the story or the poem — each tercet, though brief, has enough length to contain a complete thought or expression, that can be considered independently.
[9] The first occurrence of Dante’s terza rima rhyme scheme in English is found in parts II and III of Geoffrey Chaucer's short poem "Complaint to His Lady".
[10] Terza rima has been used by Thomas Wyatt, John Milton, Lord Byron (in The Prophecy of Dante) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (in his "Ode to the West Wind" and The Triumph of Life).
20th-century poets who have employed variations of the form include W. H. Auden ("The Sea and the Mirror"), T. S. Eliot ("Little Gidding"), Robert Frost ("Acquainted with the Night"), Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, Archibald MacLeish ("The Conquistador", winner of the Pulitzer Prize 1932), James Merrill, Jacqueline Osherow, Sylvia Plath ("The Sow"), Adrienne Rich ("Terza Rima"), Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Clark Ashton Smith, Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur and William Carlos Williams ("The Yachts").