The Influence of the Popular Ballad on Wordsworth and Coleridge

Charles Wharton Stork

doi:10.1632/456924

The Influence of the Popular Ballad on Wordsworth and Coleridge

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020

Charles Wharton Stork

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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 because it had once been close to common life; Coleridge because it was now remote from common life and gave him a form remarkably susceptible 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.

Type: Research Article
Information: PMLA , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , 1914 , pp. 299 - 326

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1632/456924 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1914

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References

^{page 300 note 1} Letters of the Wordsworth Family, ed. Knight, Vol. iii, p. 121.

^{page 300 note 2} Coleridge's Letters edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, p. 386.

^{page 300 note 3} Essay Supplementary to the Preface, 1815. Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Knight, Vol. ii, p. 247.

^{page 300 note 4} Hart-Leap Well, opening stanza of Part Second.

^{page 300 note 5} Letters, iii, pp. 466, 467.

^{page 300 note 6} Prose Works, ii, p. 253.

^{page 300 note 7} Idem, ii, p. 226.

^{page 300 note 8} The Popular Ballad, p. 91.

^{page 300 note 9} Prose Works, i, p. 52.

^{page 300 note 10} Idem, i, p. 51.

^{page 300 note 11} Prose Works, i, pp. 49, 50.

^{page 300 note 12} Prose Works, i, p. 77.

^{page 300 note 13} Idem, i, p. 66.

^{page 300 note 14} The Excursion, Book i, 11. 78–80.

^{page 300 note 15} Prose Works, i, p. 71.

^{page 300 note 16} Prose Works, ii, p. 243.

^{page 300 note 17} Biographia Literaria, chap. xxii.

^{page 300 note 18} Idem, chap. xiv.

^{page 300 note 19} Letters, iii, p. 122.

^{page 300 note 20} From the sonnet, The Trosachs.

^{page 300 note 21} Letters, i, p. 343.

^{page 300 note 22} Letters, ii, p. 62. Coleridge also says in generalising, “Wordsworth should never have abandoned the contemplative position” (Table Talk, July 21, 1832).

^{page 300 note 23} Letters, iii, p. 465.

^{page 300 note 24} Prose Works, i, p. 69.

^{page 300 note 25} Cf. Professor G. L. Kittredge's Introduction to the Cambridge edition of English and Scottish Popular Ballads and his references to Professor Gummere's works.

^{page 300 note 26} Biog. Lit., chaps, xvii, xx.

^{page 300 note 27} Cf. p. 301, supra, and note. Wordsworth expressly says that some of his figures were composites (Dowden, Studies in Literature, p. 145 and note).

^{page 300 note 28} Biog. Lit., chap. xvii.

^{page 300 note 29} Traill's Life of Coleridge (English Men of Letters Series), p. 41.

^{page 300 note 30} Letters, pp. 374–5.

^{page 300 note 31} Idem, p. 374.

^{page 300 note 32} Idem, p. 387.

^{page 300 note 33} Life of Coleridge, p. 47.

^{page 300 note 34} Idem, p. 51.

^{page 300 note 35} Idem, p. 53.

^{page 300 note 36} Letters, pp. 194–5.

^{page 300 note 37} Idem, p. 197.

^{page 300 note 38} Idem, p. 387.

^{page 300 note 39} The correct form of this line is: “That we will come to harm.” Coleridge must have mixed stanzas 7 and 8 of Percy's version.

^{page 300 note 40} Quoted in Mr. J. D. Campbell's notes, Globe ed., p. 590.

^{page 300 note 41} Ibid., p. 590.

^{page 300 note 42} Ibid., p. 590, 589.

^{page 300 note 43} Quoted in Mr. Campbell's notes, Globe ed., p. 594.

^{page 300 note 44} Biog. Lit., beginning of chap. xiv.

^{page 300 note 45} Quoted in Mr. Campbell's notes, Globe ed., p. 594.

^{page 300 note 46} Quoted in Mr. Campbell's notes to the Globe ed., p. 612–3.

^{page 300 note 47} Letters, p. 317.

^{page 300 note 48} Cf. the ballad James Harris or The Demon Lover, Cambridge ed. of Ballads.

^{page 300 note 49} One of Professor Archibald MacMechan's students has discovered that all Coleridge's borrowings came from the first volume of Percy.

^{page 300 note 50} Cf. the paper read by Professor F. N. Scott before The Modern Language Association, Dec. 30th, 1913.

^{page 300 note 51} In other chapters of a proposed book on ballad influence upon English poetry since 1765 the author hopes to show that the ballad has had in general a salutary effect in modifying the extreme individualism of the Romantic Poets.

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