In time, ancient poetry refers to 1840 China's poems before the Opium War. From the perspective of meter, ancient poetry can be divided into ancient poetry and modern poetry. Taking the Tang Dynasty as the boundary, the previous poems were all ancient poems, and then, the ancient poems gradually declined and died out. Modern poetry is also called modern poetry. During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, all the poems from The Book of Songs to Yu Xin were ancient poems, but the poems after the Tang Dynasty were not necessarily modern poems, which was the difference between rhyme and meter.
Modern poetry, also known as "vernacular poetry", is a kind of poetry. Compared with classical poetry, it is generally not constrained by format and rhythm. The discovery of modern poetry can be traced back to the late Qing Dynasty, when some poems imported from the West began to be translated into vernacular Chinese, but these works were not very large, so few people knew them. The name of modern poetry came into use in 1953 when Ji Xianlin founded the Modern Poetry Society.