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The Ballad
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A narrative poem, often in quatrains rhymed ABCB and meant to be sung, that tells a compressed story through dialogue and repeated refrain rather than sustained description, rooted in oral folk tradition. Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798) deliberately claimed the word for literary poetry, presenting invented narrative poems, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner among them, in the plain stanza form and singing cadence of the folk ballad.
Facts
Place of OriginRooted in the oral folk tradition of medieval and early modern Europe, well before it was claimed for literary poetry. 1 StructureTypically quatrains rhymed ABCB, meant to be sung, telling a compressed story through dialogue and a repeated refrain rather than sustained description. 1 Notable ExampleSamuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798). 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Form Of Genre
Lyric Poetry, Genres Anthologized as a lyric form (a sung narrative) since Lyrical Ballads itself named the poems lyrical; Princeton Encyclopedia treats the ballad among the lyric-adjacent folk forms rather than under long narrative epic.
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