English, Department of
Date of this Version
January 1921
Abstract
The leading theses of the present volume are that the following assumptions which have long dominated our thought upon the subject of poetic origins and the ballads should be given up, or at least should be seriously qualified; namely, belief in the "communal" authorship and ownership of primitive poetry; disbelief in the primitive artist; reference to the ballad as the earliest and most universal poetic form; belief in the origin of narrative songs in the dance, especially definition of the English and Scottish traditional ballad type as of dance origin; belief in the emergence of traditional ballads from the illiterate, that is, belief in the communal creation rather than re-creation of ballads; belief in the special powers of folk-improvisation; and belief that the making of traditional ballads is a "closed account."
Comments
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921