The sestina originated in medieval France. It is thought to have been invented by Arnaut Daniel, a late-12th century Provencal troubadour. (A troubadour was a composer and performer of lyric poetry and song.) Dante (1265-1321), one of the greatest of Italian poets, wrote sestinas. The form reached England in the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century, when both Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, renowned poets of their time, wrote sestinas. The form then disappeared in English literature for two centuries before returning in the 19th-century Victorian period, when poets such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Daniel Gabriel Rossetti used it to good effect. Swinburne even wrote a double sestina titled “The Complaint of Lisa,” which at 78 lines is twice as long as the standard 39-line sestina. In the 20th century there have been many notable sestinas in British and American literature. In addition to Hecht, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Donald Hall, and Marilyn Hacker wrote sestinas.

In his capacity as a literary critic, Hecht has commented on the nature of the sestina, which involves the repetition at the end of every line of the terminal words of each line of the first stanza, although in a different order.