Stanza appears in English for the first time around the end of the 16th century, having been taken from Italian. A stanza is a well-defined set of several lines of poetry with a specified length, meter, or rhyme scheme that is typically repeated. In Italian, a stanza is defined as "a resting place, room (in a house), lodge, chamber, stanza (in poetry)." The term originated from the Roman practice of writing poems in rooms called stanzas. The Romans used these rooms to express different ideas and feelings. Thus, a poem written in stanzas was called a stanzaic poem. In English, the first printed book to use the term was John Donne's Holy Sonnets. He used it to describe any group of his poems that shared a common theme or idea - such as Love and Hate, or Nature and Grace. Donne may have gotten the idea from another famous poet named Dante who used the term in his work. Dante wrote about three different kinds of stanzas in his Divine Comedy: tercets (three-line stanzas), quatrains (four-line stanzas), and sestets (six-line stanzas). Tercets are used mostly in love poems where they can be considered the standard form. Quatrains are commonly used in political poems while sestets are rare but found in some religious poems.