ballad

ballad, originally a song intended as an accompaniment to a dance; hence a light, simple song of any kind, or a popular song, often one attacking persons or institutions. Broadside ballads, such as those hawked by Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, were printed on one side of a single sheet (a ‘broadside’ or ‘broadsheet’) and sold in the streets or at fairs. In the relatively recent sense, now most widely used, a ballad is taken to be a single, spirited poem in short stanzas, in which some popular story is graphically narrated (e.g. Sir Patrick Spens), and in this sense of the word the oral tradition is an essential element. In the great collection of F. J. Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 vols, 1882–98), the oldest ballad is Judas (c.1300), with an uncharacteristically religious theme; ballads more traditionally deal with the pagan supernatural (e.g. Tam Lin), with tragic love (e.g. Barbara Allan), or with historical or semi-historical events, e.g. the Border ballads, or the Robin Hood ballads. There was a notable awakening of interest in the form in Britain in the 18th cent., which led to the researches and collections of Percy (Reliques, 1765) and Ritson, to the forgeries of Chatterton and the adaptations of Burns, and to the deliberate antiquarian imitations of Tickell (Lucy and Colin), Percy himself (The Hermit of Warkworth), Mallet (‘William and Margaret’), Goldsmith (‘The Hermit’), and others. Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is a mixture of traditional ballads, adaptations, and imitations, whereas the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge manifests, in poems like ‘The Idiot Boy’ and the Ancient Mariner, their own interpretation and development of the term. The form has continued to inspire poets, from Keats (‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’) to W. Morris, Hardy, Yeats, and Causley, and flourishes in a popular folk form as well as in a more literary guise. (For ‘ballad stanza’ see metre.)