Meeting a book to think with is not an everyday occurrence: Maureen N. McLane’s Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry is definitely one. I recommend it to folklorists who find disciplinary history intriguing or who have ever been smitten with the ballad or pondered the oral/written literary divide. McLane, a poet and scholar, is a mistress of border (that well-worn trope of ballad students) crossing, geographical and temporal, certainly, but here particularly, disciplinary; and she deals with general issues which have been central to the folkloristic enterprise—orality, authority, textualization—and raises important questions around specific aspects of some of our now-freighted genres and related subjects—the ballad, traditionality, minstrels.
This is a book about poetry or poiesis—“the making of poems, poetics, poetic apparatus, historical essays and ethnographic reveries on poetry” (7)—and offers the author’s perspective immediately: poetry “pre-existed print and writing and will undoubtedly outlast them” (7). Dealing with the period 1760–1830, the period of the British romantic poetry of the book’s title, she uses markers familiar to folklorists—the publication of the Ossianic materials and the appearance of Walter Scott’s essay “On Popular Poetry”—signaling that this discussion of poetry, of poiesis, will employ folkloristic as well as literary materials and analyses. Literary poetry and oral tradition, their creators and editors and collectors, were engaged together in on-going, mutually important discussions about the nature of poetry, its periodization, and the sources and appropriate means of mediation. McLane describes what we might call the “invention” of the past, the oral period, the use of that invention to make sense of the differences between oral and written poetry, and the ways the invention or naming of the oral served as powerful inspiration for the written—in various ways.
James Beattie’s poem, “The Minstrel,” becomes an ideal case for initial exploration. Building on received/accepted eighteenth-century ideas of the minstrel as creator/performer, Beattie gives the source of his minstrel’s traditionary/oral knowledge as a woman, thus exemplifying the feminization of the tradition and locating it in the past, here mediated poetically in print. Beattie and others, through the discursive power of the printed word, worked out ideas about a presumed earlier poetry, the past, contributing to the creation, even imagination, of literary periods in keeping with the evolutionary or stadial ideas circulating widely in informed discourse, poetic and otherwise. Likewise the antiquarian voices, the ballad collector-compiler-editors, spoke to the pastness of their remediated, though originally oral materials.
McLane’s scope is often slightly other than the usual folkloristic purview: she speaks of “balladeering” as the “singing, making, inventing, forging, collecting, editing, printing, and digital recording of ballads” (16–17) and focuses more on the “ballad collection,” following Katie Trumpener’s naming of that genre in Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, than on the specific ballad texts—in articulations I have found quite compelling: “That a print genre, the ballad collection, found itself complexly coordinating engraving, type, not to mention woodcuts suggests that we need a flexible, subtle way to think of ballad collections as processing, differentially, multiply mediated source data into print, the storage of which might be released in various ways: reading silently or aloud, singing, and/or playing the fiddle or piano. The development of the ballad collection suggests that Romanticism was not only a technology of the letter: it was also—in aspiration if not always in achievement—a technology of the note.” She explores the networks of collaborative interaction among the antiquarian men (the masculinazation of the antiquarian) and the forming of “protocols” for documentation, the critical apparatus familiar in headnotes to particular texts: the naming of sources and sometimes their dating, whether oral, manuscript, or print; the references to any ethnographic interventions, actual fieldwork and other forms of authentication and valorization of the materials under scrutiny as evidence of requisite authority; the comparison of the text under consideration with other mediated texts, often focusing on lexical variation to affirm national affiliations—as part of the cultural nationalistic urge rampant during the time period under discussion. Collectively these materials become evidence of cultural history, the stadial understanding, with balladry/orality being of the past.
If the issues around balladeering involved periodizing the past, the resuscitation of the minstrel, that early performance poet, provided a fertile literary trope employed, of course, in Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” by Wordsworth, John Clare, and others. McLane suggests the multiple ways in which orality—or mediated orality, that is, print—played a vital role in Romantic poetries: “the complex oral-literature conjunctions of this period led to an expansion of the poetic activities (editing as well as making, forging as well as collecting traditions) and contributed as well to an internalization of the complex meanings of ‘the oral’ (which is one way to understand the prominence of children and rustics in Wordsworth’s oeuvre)” (183). Borrowing the critical protocols of the ballad collection, authors, too, claimed authority and authenticity by employing a variety of authenticating moves—referring to tradition, to memory, undertaking imitation and translation, elaborating original contexts and eyewitness experiences. Going further, McLane writes, “It is not an overstatement to say that, in the last decades of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth centuries, almost every major British literary poet found him- or herself engaging with oral tradition, as well as with the figure of the oral poet, his work, his cultural position, and his method of composition” (212–213).
Admittedly, there are obvious difficulties with border crossing of the disciplinary sort—the citation of a late articulation of a long-known phenomenon, the orthographical notice of ethnomusicology with a hyphen, and a slightly odd, if interesting, excursion into African and Afro-American use of the minstrel trope. But the study as a whole convincingly suggests that our “borders” are artificially made, even invented, and that their dismantling would aid in the production of knowledge, heightening our understanding of a complex interaction of voices rather than isolated cultural phenomena.
In Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, Maureen McLane offers a model of a more expansive way to examine not only our disciplinary past, but our generic concerns. Looking at the “poetics of evanescence and of artifactualization” (1), McLane argues “that the Romantic encounter with orality—its complex representations of and debts to oral poetry, its exploration of song-culture and traditional forms like the ballad, its privileging of ethnographic authority as a poetic resource, its focus on mediation—inaugurated a long imaginative exchange that we are still witnessing” (243). She concludes with a meditation on the recurrence of blackbirds, crows, corbies across the oral and the written, convincingly illustrating the power of the oral to reinvigorate the written, and the persistence of poetry, whatever the media: “poetry emerges as a historically situated medium of culture, its workings trans- and inter-medial—moving across oral, writterly, and print modalities—and thus potentially unbindable” (14).
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[Review length: 1126 words • Review posted on June 30, 2009]