For the Tang people, classical poetry is the system and style of learning five-character poems from Han, Wei and Six Dynasties, and there is no fixed requirement for rhythm and antithesis. Therefore, compared with modern poetry, ancient poetry is relatively free in form. This freedom is mainly manifested in the following aspects: (1) In terms of rhyme, classical poetry can use both flat rhyme and oblique rhyme; Modern poetry can only use flat rhyme. (2) Classical poetry does not need to follow the flat format of modern poetry.
Because it came into being before modern poetry, the Tang people called it ancient poetry or "dynamic poetry", and some of it was called ancient style. The name "ancient style" has a historical evolution. The "ancient style" mentioned by the Tang people mostly refers to five-character ancient poems with the learning spirit of the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties. In contrast, the general ancient poetry is called "ancient style". However, after the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, some people called the seven-character song "ancient style". It's different from the original concept.
According to the number of words in each poem, ancient poems can be roughly divided into five-character ancient poems and seven-character ancient poems. There are also miscellaneous poems in seven-character ancient poems. The ancients also called four-character poems ancient poems, but from the origin, four-character poems and the ancient poems we are talking about here are not a system, so it is more appropriate to list them as a separate category. The Book of Songs and the four-character poems written by later scholars are generally called four-character poems directly in the present history of poetry. Of course, four-character poems still belong to the category of songs.
For Tang and Song poets, ancient style and Yuefu were originally the poetic styles of the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties, and their contemporary poetic styles were modern. However, due to retro thinking, advocating allegory and attaching importance to the content value of poetry, retro thinking became the mainstream of Tang and Song poetry circles. Therefore, people in the Tang and Song Dynasties attached great importance to ancient prose, ancient style and ancient Yuefu, so the genre system of ancient prose continued from the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties to the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties. The writing of ancient poems in contemporary poetry circles is also a continuation of this tradition. However, the ancient poetry in contemporary poetry circles is relatively declining. Although classical poetry does not talk about rhyme, it rhymes freely, but it has special requirements in language art, and it is difficult to learn without rhyme.