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This quatrain is a tightly carpentered box, carefully packed and built to withstand catastrophe.—A.o. Scott, New York Times, 21 Feb. 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 Written as a series of poetic quatrains (stanzas of four lines each), Nostradamus organized his predictions into 10 groups of 100 quatrains (give or take).—Stephen C. George, Discover Magazine, 25 Dec. 2023 The five-character quatrain, which rose to prominence during the Tang dynasty, has four lines consisting of five characters each.—Olivia Wang, New York Times, 14 July 2023 This second quatrain shows the progress made by a model that has nearly finished its training.—IEEE Spectrum, 30 Apr. 2020 The poem’s tercets evoke an uneasy balance, until the fourth stanza, where a quatrain appears, suspending time for just a little bit longer, like those who leaped from the burning floors.—New York Times, 8 Sep. 2022
Word History
Etymology
Middle French, from quatre four, from Latin quattuor
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