Literary Elements In Romantic Poetry: Broadside Ballads

The Encyclopedia of Romanticism defines a ballad as a narrative or dramatic poem composed in quatrains and often accompanied by music. […] The ballad emphasizes action over setting and characterization, and concentrates on the climatic moments of an event, often of a sensational or emotionally potent nature, rather than on the gradual development of plot. [...] Its capacity to deal, in unadorned simplicity, with the most powerful moments of human life, both real and wondrously imaginary, strongly appealed to the Romantic poets (O'Connor, 23).
This “unadorned simplicity” stood in stark contrast to the eloquently constructed verse of Neoclassicism and became a principle of Romantic writing. It can be found in other literary genres as

There are popular, literary and broadside ballads, all of which influenced each other strongly throughout their history (Kaufmann 54). The popular ballad is especially difficult to delimit, due to the fact that the illiterate listeners and singers of ballads were not interested in questions of genre; they did not attempt to establish a tradition distinguishable from other folk songs (cf. Pettitt, 432). Broadside ballads can be seen as an intermediate form, often composed by single authors but drawing from the rich tradition of folk ballads as well. They were sold on single pages, so-called broadsides or broadsheets, and were especially popular in the growing cities with increasing numbers of literacy (Hoffmann

The different mode of authorship allowed for different ways to use traditional tropes; although it is likely that single authors have always played a part in the composition of popular ballads, it was the transformation though repetition by the illiterate public which gave them their popular character (Ksufmann 54). Kittredge may be right in claiming that it is impossible for a single author, especially one with a literary education, to imitate “ancient ballads” (xxix), but this is not what most authors of literary ballads attempted, although reinterpretations of popular ballads such as William and Margaret (1724), based on Fair Margaret and Sweet William (Child #74),