ballad revival

ballad revival, the interest in folk poetry evinced within literary circles, especially in England and Germany, in the 18th century. Actually, it was not a revival but a new discovery and appreciation of the merits of popular poetry, formerly ignored or despised by scholars and sophisticated writers. The trend that began in England in 1711 with the publication of Joseph Addison’s three Spectator papers cautiously defending “the darling Songs of the common People” crystallized in 1765 with the publication of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, a collection of English and Scottish traditional ballads. The Reliques and a flood of subsequent collections, including Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), had great impact and provided the English Romantic poets with an alternative to outworn Neoclassical models as a source of inspiration. The impact was not reciprocal; literary ballads had no effect on the art or production of oral balladry, which was already in decline. In Germany the philosopher-critic Johann Gottfried von Herder conferred an almost mystical distinction on the ballad as the genuine expression of the spirit of the folk. The collection of lyrical and narrative folk songs Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–08; “The Boy’s Magic Horn”), edited by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, was the dominant influence on German poetry throughout the 19th century.