In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction Ballads run like a radioactive dye through elite literature in the eighteenth century and beyond, illuminating the structures and workings of high culture. Authors happen across ballads on the walls of country houses and city streets, hear them bawled out in London and Edinburgh, and track them to cottages in pursuit of minstrelsy. They turn to ballads to answer the agonized question posed by Coleridge in the second epigraph I have chosen, "Why do you make a book?" And, as the first two epigraphs reveal, Addison and Coleridge, despite their many differences, are both drawn to the much reprinted ballad of"The Children in the Wood." While Addison's reader will think he is "not serious" and although Coleridge patronizingly refers to it as a "little ballad;' they both hear this "Darling Song of the Common People" calling to them. So their enthusiasm overcomes their embarrassment in breaching the boundary between high and low, an ambivalent response to the ballad's call that is representative of the phenomenon under study herethe incorporation of ballads into elite poetry and criticism from the English Restoration to the American New Criticism. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon analyzes how the lesser lyric ofthe ballad changed lyric poetry as a whole and, in so doing, helped to transform "literature" from polite writing in general into the body of imaginative writing that becomes known as the English literary canon. This transformation lays the ground for the scholars and textbook authors who alter the canon by bringing it into the school, where the ballad is valued as the Urtext leading philologists and students from the "non-bookish" to "the bookish:' These are the words Robert Penn Warren uses to describe how he and Cleanth Brooks came to write their epoch-making primer in close reading, Understanding Poetry (1938), which proved so influential in the ensuing decades. There is a long and complex story of cultural change behind this phenomenon , uniting in their differences Mr. Spectator's coy confession, 2 Introduction Coleridge's altitudo, and Warren's reminiscence, and we can begin to tell that tale by way of a definition of the ballad from 1728 as a "song commonly sung up and down the streets."1 For those attracted to the ballad, "commonly" signifies in two ways. The first is "common" as undistinguished or as nonelite; the second is "common" as universal. Under the sign of the first "common;' the ballad lacks the prestige of high genres, carrying with it the nosewrinkling savor ofGrub Street. But this very lowness makes the ballad attractive to elite authors. Because ballads are merely "common;' elite authors are not intimidated by them; they feel freer to rewrite ballads, to show their poetic license to slum with a lower genre, and to make them object lessons in appreciating popular texts. Why they should be appreciated brings us to common-as-universal. Easily circulated and understood, the ballad avoids the bad exclusions of more courtly genres while retaining some of their valued characteristics. After 1660, the court gradually loses its centrality to a more diffuse network ofprint, and the court's rigid social hierarchy and aristocratic refinements come to seem increasingly unviable as a source of legitimate artistic practice. So authors begin to turn to the more horizontal and fluid discourse that many critics of our era call the public sphere. But in doing so they worry that the public sphere's conjoined and misshapen twin-consumer society-has made things too fluid. They are anxious that value has become a function solely of economic exchange, dissolving social ties and national traditions into self-interest and an uncritical celebration of the modern. And here, again, the ballad's common-ness makes it attractive, for it remains rooted in the history of Great Britain. Prior to the Restoration, the ballad had attracted a few passing favorable comments by Sir Philip Sidney and others, but these were far outnumbered by scornful dismissals.2 So during this era the ballad, unlike Shakespeare and other elite authors, was valued for the first time, and its eighteenth-century reappraisal was also key in establishing the canon. (In fact, as we will see, Shakespeare's rising reputation had something to do with the ballad.) Yet, unlike the novel, another genre that "rises" in the eighteenth century, the ballad is credited with stronger ties to English tradition-for instance, when it is used as a native counterweight against the fripperies of Italian opera. The ballad also differs from...

Share