The Influence of the Popular Ballad on Wordsworth and Coleridge

Abstract

Although both Wordsworth and Coleridge were strongly influenced by the popular ballad, they were attracted by this form for very different reasons and affected by it in very different ways. The one point in common is that this influence was in both cases mainly for good. Wordsworth was drawn to the ballad by its directness and simplicity of style, and by the fact that it often treats of the lower classes of men in what Rousseau would have called a natural state of society. Coleridge took up the ballad for a nearly opposite reason; i. e., because of its remoteness from modern life, a remoteness that left him free play for his imagination. Thus, oddly, Wordsworth cultivated the ballad be,caiuse it had once been close to common life; Coleridge because it was now remote from common life and gave him a form remarkably susoeptible of that strangeness which the romantic genius habitually adds to beauty. Wordsworth preferred the domestic, or occasionally the sentimental-romantic, ballad; Coleridge markedly adhered to the supernatural ballad. As the subj ect is rather complex for a brief surv,ey, the following arrangement will be adopted: to examine in each author separately the influence of the ballad, first generally and in relation to his theory of poetry;, secondly, in detail as to the subject, treatment, and form of the poetry itself. At the outset we encounter Wordsworth's prefaces to the Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge's attempts to explain them in his ]3iographia Literaria. Wordsworth's theory of poetry has been such a mooted question that we are 299