ballad (literature)

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Literary genre of traditional narrative poetry, widespread in Europe and the USA. Ballads are simple in metre, sometimes (as in Russia) without regular lines and rhymes or (as in Denmark) dependent on assonance. Concerned with some strongly emotional event, the ballad is halfway between the lyric poem and the epic. Most English ballads date from the 15th century but may describe earlier events. Poets involved in Romanticism both in England and in Germany were greatly influenced by the ballad revival, as seen in, for example, the Lyrical Ballads (1798) of English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. Des Knaben Wunderhorn/The Boy's Magic Horn (1805–08), a collection edited by German writers Klemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, was a major influence on 19th-century German poetry. The ballad form was adapted in ‘broadsheets’ (so called because they were printed on large sheets of paper), with a satirical or political motive, and in the ‘hanging’ ballads purporting to come from condemned criminals.

Historically, the ballad was primarily intended for singing at the communal ring-dance, the refrains representing the chorus.

Opinion is divided as to whether the authorship of the ballads may be attributed to individual poets or to the community. Later ballads tend to centre on a popular folk hero, such as Robin Hood or Jesse James.

In 19th-century music the refined drawing-room ballad had a vogue, but a more robust tradition survived in the music hall; folk song played its part in the development of pop music, and in this genre slow songs are often called ‘ballads’, regardless of content.

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