Ballads: Keats and

Wordsworth
English Literature Since Romanticism
Tung-An Wei
Fall 2023
Lyrical Ballads (First edition of 1798)
• Opens with Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Closes with Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”
• Owes to the folk ballades transcribed by Thomas Percy and Robert
Burns
• Mixed reviews (Norton p. 281)

2
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Norton 303)
• “Experiments” to determine “how far the language of conversation in
the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of
poetic pleasure” (first edition)
• Not as experiments but exemplifying the principles of all good poetry
(second edition)

3
Neoclassicism (Norton 303)
• Hierarchy in poetic genres Epic, tragedy
• Decorum Comedy, satire, pastoral
• Elevated language
• Artful figures of speech Short lyric

4
Wordsworth's attack on
neoclassicism (Norton 303)
• Represent incidents and situations from common life
• Use ordinary language of the time
• Use imagination to present ordinary things in an unusual way
->Poetry of sincerity rather than of artifice

5
Poetry’s role (Norton 303)
• Antidote to urban, industrial mass culture (Gothic novels, German
melodramas)
• Keeps humans emotionally alive and morally sensitive
• Keeps humans essentially human

6
Preface to Lyrical Ballads
• Incidents and situations from common life (Norton 305)
• Use language really used by men (305)
• Trace human nature in ordinary situations, especially how we
associate ideas in a state of excitement (305)
• Feelings give importance to the action and situation, not vice versa
(Norton 307)
• Rejects personification of abstract ideas (308)

7
Preface to Lyrical Ballads
• For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting
with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind.
[…] The most effective of these are the great national events which are
daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities
(307)
• See note 7 on p. 307
• Invaluable works are driven into neglect by frantic novels, stupid
German tragedies, and extravagant stories in verse (307-308)

8
What’s a poet? (Norton 310-314)
• A man speaking to man
• More prompt to think and feel without immediate external excitement
• Has greater knowledge of human nature
• Has greater power in expressing what he thinks and feels
• Rejoices in the sprit of life more than other men
• Produces immediate pleasure to acknowledge human nature and the
beauty of the universe indirectly
• Considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other
• Does not write for poets alone, but for men

9
 “origin from emotion
recollected in tranquility”
(Norton 314)

“all good poetry is the

spontaneous overflow of
feelings” (Norton 306, 314)
History of ballads
• Probably many millennia old
• Etymology: Old French ballade, from Provençal balada, which meant
”song accompanied by dance,” from balar, “dance,” from Latin ballare,
from Greek ballizein. C.f. “ball” and “ballet”

11
Key features of ballads
• Short oral narrative poems sung by illiterate men or women
• Often with a repeated refrain sung by a chorus
• Meant to be performed
• Accompanied by dance, at least during the refrains
• Often about love or war
• Usually enter it near the climax or most dramatic moment

12
Key features of ballads
• There is little background or context setting
• Characters are generic types and thinly sketched
• The narrator’s voice is impersonal
• The diction is simple and unembellished
• In English the typical “ballad stanza” had alternating four-beat and three-
beat lines, four lines to a stanza, and rhymed abab or abcd

13
Ballad revival
• Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)
• Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802)
• Collections of transcriptions of ballads

14
Traditional ballads vs. lyric ballads
• Traditional ballads • In Wordsworth’s and
often focus on Coleridge’s ballads: the
dramatic tale recedes and a moment
moments. of insight or feeling
• The main emerges as the main
characters might subject->similar to lyric
reveal something poetry
of their psyches. • “Lyrical” comes from lyre

15
Keats (Norton 950-952)
• Abandoned medicine for poetry
• Working-class poet, c.f. Byron and
Shelley
• “I will write independently”: anxious
about literary influence
• Negative reviews motivated by political
prejudice and class snobbery
• Turned to journalism and plays to earn
money for his family
• Concrete descriptions of all the senses

16
Ballad meter
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

(“La Belle Dame sans Merci” lines 1-4)

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Ballad meter
• Four-line stanza O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, A
• (Iambic tetrameter + iambic
trimeter) x 2 Alone and palely loitering? B
• ABCB (A and C do not
rhyme) The sedge has withered from the lake, C
• Sometimes also ABAB
And no birds sing. B

(“La Belle Dame sans Merci” lines 1-4)

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“La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad”
• Departs from the standard iambic tetrameter by
reducing the fourth line to two feet
• Femme fatale
• Note 1 on p. 972: dialogue form in ballad
tradition
• Uncanny effect
• Stanza 12 repeats stanza 1
• knight’s reply: stanzas 4 to 12

La Belle Dame sans Merci by Henry Meynell Rheam, 1901 19

Homework
• Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Norton pp. 448-464)

• Sir Walter Scott, From “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” (Norton pp. 425-
426)