Nineteen ancient poems are not the work of one person, and the author cannot be tested. They may have been written by scholars in the Eastern Han Dynasty. When The Selected Works was first included, the author's name was not recorded. Liu Xie initiated Hanshu, saying that Fu Yi wrote a piece of bamboo slips alone in Ran Ran. Wang Shizhen guessed that there were "miscellaneous articles written by Mei Sheng, Zhang Heng and Cai Yong", and Xu Ling thought that eight of them were written by Mei Cheng in the early Han Dynasty, but later generations thought this statement was not credible.
It is generally believed that this is not the work of one person, nor is it the work of a period. According to the content, theme and language style of poetry, it is speculated that it originated around the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty. Although there is no definite evidence, there are still many speculations and arguments about the authors of these poems. Zheng Bin speculated in the Evolutionary History of China Literature that Nineteen Poems was written in the Western Jin Dynasty at the latest, but this is only speculation and lacks empirical evidence. For example, some people think that these poems were written by literati on the grounds that the language of these poems is obviously tempered, unlike typical folk songs; However, some people think that Nineteen Ancient Poems have distinctive folk songs, because they think that these poems describe the feelings and situations of ordinary people in plain language. Zhong Rong's poem: "Ancient poetry originated from the national style", Wang Shizhen's "Yu Yang Poetry Talk" says: "After elegance, there is Chu Sao, and after Chu Sao, there are nineteen poems. The wind direction will change, not because of human resources, but because it has only one origin.