At the beginning of the literati's five-character poems, the views of predecessors were quite different. In the Western Han Dynasty, Mei Cheng, Li Ling, Su Wu and Ban Jieyu, these old five-character books, are actually unreliable. The earliest extant five-character poem of literati should be an epic poem sung by Ban Gu in the Eastern Han Dynasty. Zhong Rong's "Poetry" is said to be "wordless", which shows that the literati are still very unskilled when they first learn five-character poetry. The following authors are Zhang Heng's Song of Simultaneous Speech, Qin Jia's Poem for Women, and Zhao Yi's Song of Sickness. Their performance skills are becoming more and more mature. At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the appearance of Nineteen Ancient Poems by an anonymous writer marked the maturity of five-character poems. By Jian 'an, Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, five-character poems had become the most popular poetic style, and a large number of famous poems appeared.
Five-character poetry is one of the genres of ancient Chinese poetry. Refers to a five-word poem, and the whole poem consists of five words. Five-character poems are formed by absorbing Han folk songs. Five-character poems can accommodate more words, thus expanding the capacity of poems and expressing feelings and narratives more flexibly and meticulously. In terms of syllables, even-odd matching is more musical. Therefore, it is more suitable for the social life developed after the Han Dynasty, thus gradually replacing the orthodox position of four-character poetry and becoming one of the main forms of classical poetry. Modern poetry appeared after the early Tang Dynasty, including five-character poems and five-character quatrains. The five-character poems before the Tang Dynasty are generally called "five-character ancient poems" or "five-character poems".