Lines of iambic pentameter which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, cc, and so on.
The adjective "heroic" was applied in the later seventeenth century because of the frequent use of such couplets in heroic (that is, epic) poems and in heroic dramas. This verse form was introduced into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer (in The Legend of Good Women and most of The Canterbury Tales), and has been in constant use ever since.
From the age of John Dryden through that of Samuel Johnson, the heroic couplet was the pre-dominant English measure for all the poetic kinds; some poets, including Alexander Pope, used it almost to the exclusion of other meters.
In that era, usually called the Neoclassic Period, the poets wrote in closed couplets, in which the end of each couplet tends to coincide with the end either of a sentence or of a self-sufficient unit of syntax.
The sustained employment of the closed heroic couplet meant that two lines had to serve something of the function of a stanza.
In order to maximize the interrelations
of the component parts of the couplet, neoclassic poets often used an end-
stopped first line (that is, made the end of the line coincide with a pause in
the syntax), and also broke many single lines into subunits by balancing the line around a strong caesura, or medial pause in the syntax.
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