I had a dream ... (13)

"The traditional ballad form has no place in modern English verse": Discuss.

"I once made love to a female clown. She twisted my penis into a poodle." - Dan Whitney

blacksheepboy wrote: Oh well, I do know at least one person who likes it. Maybe you just had to be there . "The traditional ballad form has no place in modern English verse": Discuss.

Poetry is not the most popular genre anywhere, but maybe particularly on IC! I liked your poem, even though these days I am more of a modern blank verse kind of girl. There is a personal element that rings true through the form of the verse which is good.

P.s. have you ever been to the Poetry Cafe near Covent Garden? It's like CCK for poetry lovers. I would hang out there a lot if I lived in London. I have an affinity with people who like poetry more than with many other groups of people. XX

Equality is over-rated

Edited 17 Jul 08, 10:22 AM by newfavourite

What I should do is set this tale to a collection of the finest power chords known to man, rather in the manner of Uriah Heep, say. Yeah, that would ROCK! I can see this becoming a classic metal anthem. Let's see, I think a 5 minute guitar solo could go after the 7th verse. *Scuttles off to fetch gee-tar*

Hey, it worked for Coleridge, you know: "In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasuredome decree, where Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea." He didn't even realise he was a heavy-metal lyricist, just way ahead of his time .

I might check out the poetry cafe, newfave. I think they also do something similar at the Troubadour near Earl's Court.

What's the point having cake, if you can't eat it?

The ballad form is difficult to pull off because of that 4 3 4 3 which can sound unintentionally comic. What I'd advise is make it more demotic - more contemporary - use language from today and lever it into the form but try and make it appear natural. Otherwise it sounds all lofty, highflown and anachronistic - oh god sorry I did 8 years of giving poetry workshops and it did my head in in the end But you get the drift. Try writing it again from the perpective of several different people too that also helps.

My favourite ballad is the Twa Corbies which is still as demotic as you can get - imagine two Scots kids sitting on a wall talking. It starts in Media Res and, of course, the denouement is the fact, revealed elliptically that the knight was done in by his lady fair most probably. Sorry, sorry just stick a hand over my mouth before I go off on one ...

Stick with it - write a few you've got the form down pat

Edited 17 Jul 08, 11:29 PM by DDDDom

Thanks, yes the Twa Corbies is a great ballad, slightly unusual in the fact that it uses consonance as well as full rhyme and its AABB rhyme scheme. Also, the fact that it's in dialect makes it sound more contemporary. The ballad is such an ancient form that I'll wager that Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and Keats' 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' would have sounded outmoded even in their own time, although that didn't stop them! Keats in particular was excoriated by contemporary critics, I believe, in spite of his Odes. (Obviously my own effort above owes quite a lot to Keats' theme).

The tightness of the ballad form makes it difficult to render complex ideas but suits it to plainer narrative structures. I agree with what you say about using differnt viewpoints; in fact I initially experimented with a 3rd-person perspective, but ultimately decided it was better in first-person. As ever, the test is whether it rings true when read out loud - and it's a test I always put to my own verse. And even if the subject matter is a flight of fancy, it can be read on more than one level, and may ring true without recourse to colloquial diction. But it's a tightrope, as you say, and there's a thin line between archaic whimsy and true expression. I try to tread just on the right side of that line, but as close as I dare. Maybe I succeeded, maybe not - if not I can always make a metal anthem out of it .

What's the point having cake, if you can't eat it?

Yeah it was - but then all that negative capability stuff was the interesting thing about his work - well for me anyway because those concepts had deeper roots and were of their time just as the romantics are often misread or the metaphors missed...

I just can't get near to ballad form - I would totally subvert it personally - it's the one form I have tried and tried without success for those very reasons - it just doesn't sound great no matter how many levels of the onion skin there are...but that's purely a personal thing. but you are using inverted phrasing there to stress the rhyme and it falls into the trap of sounding lapidary and bleeding the sense and that's not something the romantics even did or did even Plus the use of adjectives...it's a minefield - you're braver than I am!

I guess, the modern ballad for me starts and possibly ends with Alexander Pope. But that's something else altogether

Edited 18 Jul 08, 1:15 AM by DDDDom

Equality is over-rated

We should get together and talk about this - I'm intrigued. I certainly don't know as much as you do about interpreting the romantics, or lit crit generally, so please tell me more ... (tomorrow perhaps?)

DDDDom wrote: I just can't get near to ballad form - I would totally subvert it personally - it's the one form I have tried and tried without success for those very reasons - it just doesn't sound great no matter how many levels of the onion skin there are...but that's purely a personal thing. but you are using inverted phrasing there to stress the rhyme and it falls into the trap of sounding lapidary and bleeding the sense and that's not something the romantics even did or did even Plus the use of adjectives...it's a minefield - you're braver than I am! I guess, the modern ballad for me starts and possibly ends with Alexander Pope. But that's something else altogether

Ah, but many of the same criticisms could surely be levelled at Uriah Heep's classic Lady in Black .

Seriously though, there's nowt wrong with adjectives, as long as they are not thoughtlessly applied, just to pad out a line. Practically every great poem has adjectives (and adverbs)! They should be used sparingly though, and only when they help the sense. I can assure you, there are good reasons why my sky is 'cool blue' and not 'clear blue' or 'grey' or anything else. My ballad has its faults (and inversions I might rather have avoided) but lay off the adjectives!

I think it's also important to remember with the ballad form that it was originally intended to be sung (as the Twa Corbies was) and should really be thought of as a song, with or without a tune. Then it makes a lot more sense, and you can get away with things in song that you might not in speech - such as inversions.

My own personal favourite modern ballad is Auden's As I Walked Out One Evening. It's not entirely free of archaisms (or adjectives), but it's just god-damn beautiful. And as Keats wrote: '"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know'. Some would disagree with that, though, and they might not like Auden's ballad either, so as another sage once said, it's 'each to their own'.

What's the point having cake, if you can't eat it?

You are joking - I'm up for a night out !!!!

DDDDom wrote: I just can't get near to ballad form - I would totally subvert it personally - it's the one form I have tried and tried without success for those very reasons - it just doesn't sound great no matter how many levels of the onion skin there are...but that's purely a personal thing. but you are using inverted phrasing there to stress the rhyme and it falls into the trap of sounding lapidary and bleeding the sense and that's not something the romantics even did or did even Plus the use of adjectives...it's a minefield - you're braver than I am! I guess, the modern ballad for me starts and possibly ends with Alexander Pope. But that's something else altogether

blacksheepboy wrote: Ah, but many of the same criticisms could surely be levelled at Uriah Heep's classic Lady in Black .

I always liked John Barleycorn.

Yep we're back to negative capability there again.

What's the point having cake, if you can't eat it?