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This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme.—New York Times, 22 Apr. 2026 Those wistful quatrains and sharp internal rhymes, tangled with that ceaseless longing and creamy high tenor, were my first lesson in prosody.—Emily Temple, Literary Hub, 11 Nov. 2025 The thundering poet termed the result uninspired and banal, so the other professor went into Dickinson’s 1,800-poem corpus, retrieved an obscure quatrain and presented it to the poet, who called the result banal and uninspired.—David Galef, Chicago Tribune, 21 Feb. 2025 But a lot of people know four lines from Joan of Arc: her quatrain.—Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 13 Dec. 2024 Most of the poems unfold in tight, jagged quatrains.—Maggie Doherty, The New Yorker, 2 Sep. 2024 Hammond gave Deep-speare’s quatrains very high marks for rhyme and rhythm.—Jey Han Lau, IEEE Spectrum, 30 Apr. 2020
Word History
Etymology
Middle French, from quatre four, from Latin quattuor