Ballad, Literary

Abstract

The ballad becomes self‐consciously literary towards the end of the eighteenth century, at the point at which its oral transmission and constant recreation begin to come under substantial threat from the mobility caused by social change (Stewart 1994). That icon of Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads (1798), implies in its title the loss of a whole mode of oral narrative culture and its reconfiguration with a concentration on personal emotion. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, the ballad was a form that exemplified simple, affecting statement, because of its roots as far back as a supposed medieval past and its links with ordinary, unsophisticated people. However, Wordsworth's explanation in the Preface to the expanded 1800 edition insists that the emotion of the poems gives significance to the action, not vice versa. This puts the emphasis on the lyrical aspect of the collection, marginalizing the narrative that would be central to a modern, folklorist definition of the ballad. Such an emphasis was characteristic of the period, and the modes of generic adaptation practised by Wordsworth and Coleridge were more widespread than their claims and earlier Romantic scholarship give cause to suppose.