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49  Hymn, the “Ballad Wild,” and Free Verse Bear with the Ballad – “Sang from the Heart, Sire,” F1083 As the previous chapter demonstrates, although a great variety of verse was considered lyric, from sea chanties to verse of highly irregular rhyming and stanzaic structure, the lyric poem as such was not a much discussed genre in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. In contrast, the ballad had been the topic of active public debate for decades by the time of Dickinson ’s youth. Following the late eighteenth-century ballad revival in the British Isles, with its defining impact on Romantic poetry, the ballad had become a popular form for imitation and experiment—no doubt spurring the American enthusiasm for departures from set form, especially for short-lined poems . While there is ample evidence that Dickinson wrote with the rhythms of hymns in her ears, several aspects of her verse suggest that a more accurate formulation would be that she wrote in relation to song. Song, in this context, includes the hymns and ballads she sang, the poetry she read, and the popular music she played on the piano.1 I do not mean by this that Dickinson imagines her poems literally as sung or even as oral—in distinction to their significant aurality: Dickinson knew traditions of oral and communal poetry like the ballad through a combination of print and recitation or song, and she understood the integrity of the page. At the same time, her poetry leans strongly toward what might be called a secondary or written orality: like Robert Browning, Whitman, and others of her contemporaries, she creates the fiction of a speaking presence with great attention to inflections and rhythms of speech, but speech that she assumes will be known primarily through the page (see Chapter 4).2 Many prose writers of the 1840s and 1850s experimented with dialect and regional idioms—famously in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in travel or humorous sketches— and dialect poetry was written frequently during the Civil War. Dickinson writes in an idiom familiar to her New England ear, combining the verve and idiosyncracies of speech with the measures of song, perhaps one reason for her apparent simultaneous delight in the patterned opportunities afforded by short-lined verse and in the loosening or disrupting of those patterns to make her language more “alive.”3 There is a long tradition of permeable boundaries between poems and songs: songs have “lyrics” and poems are often set to music or titled “Song” or “Hymn”—as in Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” or Bryant’s “Song of the Stars” and Emerson’s “Hymn: sung at the completion of the Concord monument , April 19, 1836”—all poems Dickinson knew.4 Writing of the “lyrical productions” selected for his poetry anthology Songs of Three Centuries, John Greenleaf Whittier exclaims that “the last century has been prolific in song” (Whittier on Writers 202). Dickinson herself frequently refers to poems as songs and imagines birds as like poets in “The Robin’s my Criterion for Tune –” (F256), “The Robin is the One” (F501C), “The Birds begun at Four o’clock –” (F504 B), “The Robin for the Crumb” (F810 B), and “At Half past Three, a single Bird” (F1099 B), to give just a few examples of poems where birds produce “reports,” “Miracle,” “Chronicle,” or “Experiment.” Michael Cohen writes that in the early nineteenth century “songs, stories, and poems come from a surprisingly wide array of sources” and “cannot be located precisely in any one cultural domain.” Ballads in particular, he argues, constitute a hybrid form of oral and print cultures and a “‘folk’ form” that was associated with medieval troubadours but often used contemporary events as subject matter (“Peddlars” 12, 28).5 Both ballads and hymns reveal aspects of their oral base as sung, shared, and shaped communally. The extraordinary fertility of Dickinson’s stanzaic and metrical forms arises from these intersections of elite and popular, printed and sung, religious and secular short-lined forms prevalent in the 1840s and 1850s. Her experimentation with loosened meter, shifts in stanzaic form mid-poem, and testing of free verse rhythms also reveals the influence of the eighteenthcentury ballad revival as it had filtered into American popular poetry. Following this revival, fascination with traditional ballads brought renewed interest in the accentual rhythms of medieval verse and a vogue for imitating such forms. According to Albert Friedman, the ballad revival broke the “tyranny” of the iamb in the nineteenth century by (re...

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