The origin of quatrains:
1. The earliest couplet poem was "Poem of White Terrace" written by Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty and his courtiers. The way is that everyone writes a seven-character poem, and each sentence rhymes to form a poem. In the Jin Dynasty, Jia Chong and his wife Li Furen each wrote five sentences. Later, Tao Yuanming, Yun and Xun began to write five words and four sentences each.
By the Northern and Southern Dynasties, it was very popular for everyone to write five words and four sentences. Poets at that time believed that more than two people wrote a poem at the same time, one person wrote four sentences first, and the others continued four sentences each. If they are not linked together, they become couplets or couplets. But if one person makes four sentences first and others can't continue, then the remaining four sentences are called broken sentences or quatrains. This is the origin of the word 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 prevalence of law, ancient quatrains are 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.