Jueju is a poetic style of ancient poetry. A poem expressing four sentences can be divided into five, six and seven sentences. This naming method is similar to Li Shangyin's Untitled and the epigrams in Song Ci.
The earliest known quatrains appeared in Yutai New Poetry written by Xu Ling of Chen Dynasty. This book contains four five-character poems of the Han Dynasty, but none of them have titles. The editor added a title called "Ancient quatrains".
Classification of quatrains
1. According to the rhythm of poetry, quatrains are divided into quatrains and archaic quatrains. Quatrains appeared only after the rise of metrical poems, while ancient quatrains existed long before the appearance of metrical poems. Xu Ling, editor-in-chief of Chen Dynasty in the Southern Dynasties, is known as the "ancient quatrains". However, although this quatrain rhymes, it is relatively free, or it can be said that some poets are unwilling to be bound by meter.
2. After the law prevailed, ancient quatrains were still used and developed. There were many five-character quatrains in ancient times, but few seven-character quatrains. So seven words and eight sentences are not very common.
3. According to the number of words in each sentence, quatrains can be divided into five-character quatrains, six-character quatrains and seven-character quatrains, of which five-character quatrains are mostly and six-character quatrains are few.