For readers of this journal, the title of Steve Newman’s book, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon, is likely to appear misleading, for it is not primarily about ballad collecting--that is, the work of folk song collectors--at all. Rather, it sets out to chart the literary appropriation of the popular ballad by, among others, D’Urfey, Gay, Addison, Ramsay, Burns, Blake, and Wordsworth. By “ballad” is meant something like popular song; Newman has found a definition from 1728 of a “song commonly sung up and down the streets” (2)--which is interesting, if not especially helpful--but annoyingly he cites it from a modern book on ballad opera and does not give the original source. Historically, of course, it is a perfectly valid usage; but it is not until the final chapter of this book that we get to hear (fleetingly) about Francis James Child, and very few of the standard books in the field of ballad studies make it into the bibliography.
These are not so much criticisms as caveats: this is a book about the literary canon. A recurrent motif is the idea that what song especially brings to the canon is its necessarily collective nature. “Collection is their [i.e., literary authors’] way of accessing the ballad’s collectivity, a way to take advantage of the ballad’s circulation as a cheap commodity while framing it so that it remains tied to a common nationality” (3). Yet one never quite feels that Newman’s ballads do actually descend into the street, except perhaps in Addison’s account. This is partly because there is, for instance, virtually no discussion of such familiar matters as broadside circulation or, indeed, folk song collecting. The approach is generally one of close readings of occurrences of popular songs in literature, in order to illustrate their relations to wider historical and cultural movements. To take just one example, Allan Ramsay’s songs are incorporated into a broad account of the Scottish Enlightenment, gender relations, cultural nationalism and “national schizophrenia,” improvement as an engine of social change, and the rise of the literati. This is all done very well. Songs are seen as being integrated into the “improvement” of English (and Scottish) letters. Then with Ritson and Percy, and subsequently Blake and Wordsworth, ballads and songs, and the mode of lyric generally, are appropriated to political discourses.
The chapter on Blake and Wordsworth is perhaps the least rewarding, in part because there is so much more to these poets than their sporadic use of song. We are told that the aim is “to show how two important practitioners of Romantic lyric take in the historical and the social by way of their revision of the Ballad Revival” (183), but this is not really set out in detail. Wordsworth may have been reacting to certain excesses of German ballads by the likes of Bürger, but he could have learned something from English-language ballads if some of the dismal verses quoted from Peter Bell, for example, are anything to go by. The section on Blake in particular is likely to prove difficult to assess for anyone not fully au fait with current Blake scholarship, since the author is keen to show his mastery thereof--and this may be part of the problem: he is simply trying here to do too much.
Indeed, the book in general is somewhat given to academic jargon (for a book about “the call of the popular,” the writing style is remarkably inaccessible) and contains numerous in-references to currents in contemporary criticism, especially of the eighteenth century: “literary loneliness,” for example (61); or the “lyric subject” (187), “a self constructed over time by its experience with songs,” of which, apparently, Scott is a paradigm. It is not that this is not a useful idea, but the author does have an irritating habit of repeating such favorite but ultimately rather slight phrases--Gummere’s “cadent feet” is another one (189 ff.)--ad nauseam. The final chapter traces the ideas of Gummere and the role of the ballad as a democratizing force in the construction of the “imagined community” (with reference, of course, to the work of Benedict Anderson) in American education. Notably, the ballad lent itself to the educational theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, in terms both of literary history and students’ capacity for literary appreciation. This paves the way for the treatment of the ballad in the New Criticism of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. Although the New Criticism approach to poetry is focused on form and structure “in which the individual reader can learn how to find his or her proper self” (215)--the “lyric subject," in fact--Newman manages, just, to square this with Gummere’s democratic project, though (at least from a transatlantic perspective) we have to take much of this on trust. Indeed, the final few pages shy away a little from the idea of the necessarily democratizing influence of the popular.
As an account of the appropriation of popular songs into the literary canon, this is a first-rate book, especially in the earlier chapters, which expands our understanding of what was going on in the “long eighteenth century.” Students of the ballad of a strongly literary persuasion will find it not easy, but largely rewarding reading; and literature students will learn a lot about their subject, if not much about the ballad. Others are likely to find its appropriation of the term “ballad collection” rather annoying.
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[Review length: 898 words • Review posted on February 6, 2008]