heroic couplet is an English classical poetic style, which evolved from a ten-syllable double-rhyme poetic style. Each line has five steps, and each step has two syllables, the first is light tone, and the second is stress. The sentence pattern is balanced, neat, accurate, concise and elegant.
heroic couplet was first created and named by Johander Leiden, the first poet laureate, and led the English poetic style in 17th-18th century. There are a lot of related data that Chaucer was the first writer who widely used heroic couplet, so heroic couplet was created by Chaucer. This answer is not comprehensive and biased. Heroic couplet is not a simple concept of rhythm, but also a concept of style and format.
Chaucer did write a double-line poem, but he never wrote a heroic double-line poem. Decasyllbic couplet was popular at that time. In Chaucer's poems, we can often see this form of Kotaro Oshio rhyme, but it is not a heroic couplet, but only a ten-step couplet.
The development and formation of heroic couplet took a long time, and it was basically finalized in Dreyton, and the definition of heroic couplet was strictly defined by literary critics. Generally speaking, the following conditions need to be met.
1. iambic pentameter
2. Kotaro Oshio rhyme antithesis sentence
3. The rhyme ending is AA BB CC DD ...... not repeated.
4. Simple style. When there are only a few antithetical sentences in a poem that meet the above conditions and most of the other poems fail to meet the above conditions, the poem cannot be called heroic couplet. Just as there happen to be two seven-character poems in Li Bai's long poem, you can't say that the whole long poem is a seven-character quatrain, and no one will ever call a long poem like "Coming into Wine" a quatrain.
To put it simply, Dryden's previous poems should not be called heroic duet, because he was the first writer to write this genre of poems. Poems before Dryden, including Chaucer's poems, should be called two-line style, and poems similar in form and style to heroic two-line style should be called ten-step two-line style.
In fact, the two-line style is the main form of English poetry, and there are various prosodic formats. Chaucer's era is a time when a hundred flowers blossom. Chaucer not only wrote the two-line style with ten steps, but also wrote the two-line style with other steps. However, Chaucer did not write the two-line style with ten steps as a genre, but as an element in poetry. Neither Chaucer nor Shakespeare has ever heard of the term heroic two-line style, and they don't realize that it will be the bud of a literary genre that will dominate the poetry world in the future.
William Shakespeare (English: William Shakespeare, April 23, 1564-April 23, 1616) was often honored as Shakespeare in Chinese society. In the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, Lu Xun called Shakespeare "the narrow spire" in "The Theory of Moro Poetry" (February 198). He was the most outstanding dramatist in the history of English literature and the most important in the European Renaissance.