Directory of Ballad Resources

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A narrative poem often set to music, commonly with four-line stanzas rhyming abab or abcb with lines 1 and 3 in tetrameter and lines 2 and 4 in trimeter. The form was popular in the British Isles in the medieval period and later spread to North America and Australia. Some non-narrative poems are also written in traditional ballad stanzas, and some later ballads extended the traditional stanza to six lines.

Resources in This Category

• Ballad

  http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/ballad.html
  A short history of the form with a link to a description of the ballad stanza.

• Ballad

  http://www.webexhibits.org/poetry/explore_famous_ballad_atglance.html
  A history of the ballad with many famous examples of the form. Includes instruction on how to write a ballad.

• Ballad of the Goodly Fere

  http://www.bartleby.com/265/295.html
  A famous modern literary ballad by Ezra Pound.

• Ballads For Dummies

  http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/ballads-a-traditional-form-of-poetry.seriesId-332011.html
  Simple instructions on how to write a ballad with a link to a prior lesson in how to write in meter and rhyme.

• Connections: Poetry: Forms: The Ballad

  http://www.math.grin.edu/~simpsone/Connections/Poetry/Forms/ballad1.html
  A four-page description of the form with examples both old and new.

• Poetic Forms: The Ballad

  http://www.writing-world.com/poetry/ballad.shtml
  A description and short history of the form, with examples, by Conrad Geller.

• The Oxford Book of Ballads

  http://www.bartleby.com/243/
  176 selections by the anthologist Arthur Quiller-Couch. Indexed by title and first line.

• The Traditional Ballad Index

  http://www.fresnostate.edu/folklore/BalladSearch.html
  Annotated bibliography of folk ballads.

 

Home > Arts > Literature > Poetry > Forms > Fixed Verse Forms > Ballad

 

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