Ballads Literary Styles

Characteristics:  Quatrains (four line stanzas) of alternating lines of iambic (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable) tetrameter (eight syllables) and iambic trimeter (six syllables), known as ballad meter.  Usually, only the second and fourth line of a quatrain are rhymed (in the scheme a, b, c, b), which has been taken to suggest that, originally, ballads consisted of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse, each of fourteen syllables.

Characteristics:  In all traditions most ballads are narrative in nature, with a self-contained story, often concise and relying on imagery, rather than description, which can be tragic, historical, romantic or comic  Another common feature of ballads is repetition, sometimes of fourth lines in succeeding stanzas, as a refrain, sometimes of third and fourth lines of a stanza and sometimes of entire stanzas

Types  Classified into three major groups: traditional, broadside and literary  The traditional, classical or popular (meaning of the people) ballad has been seen as originating with the wandering minstrels of late medieval Europe.   Religious, supernatural, tragic, love ballads, historic, legendary and humorous.[1][1]

Types:  Broadside ballads (also known as 'roadsheet’, ‘stall’, ‘vulgar’ or ‘come all ye’ ballads) were a product of the development of cheap print from the sixteenth century  Literary or lyrical ballads grew out of an increasing interest in the ballad form among social elites and intellectuals, particularly in the Romantic movement from the later eighteenth century

Closing:  How are the ideas of the past prevalent in the literature of today’s society?  How is the style of a text relative to its function?  How does literature continue to change

HOMEWORK:  Research/ find a ballad AND one or two variations of it  Print them and bring to class tomorrow  Identify/ note literary devices and characteristics of ballads  Check this site for assistance: