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Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it.
All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings,
All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages,
Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future.
-Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage
Writing to the Irish poet and ballad anthologist William Allingham in the summer of 1855, Dante Gabriel Rossetti explained that he was underwhelmed by the former's poem, "The Music Master," as it lacked the enticements he expected of ballads:
[O]ne can only speak of one's own needs & cravings: & I must confess a need, in narrative dramatic poetry . . . of something rather "exciting," & indeed I believe something of the "romantic" element, to rouse my mind to anything like the moods produced by personal emotion in my own life. That sentence is shockingly ill-worded, but Keats's narratives would be the kind I mean.1
One is struck both by the aesthetic feeling that Rossetti attempts to discriminate-the connection he draws between romance narrative and personal emotion-and by the hesitation with which he does so: before he wrote "romantic," Rossetti wrote "schoolgirl," then crossed it out. The strikethrough has the force of an embarrassed admission about the appeal of ballads to an otherwise high-minded literary reader, particularly when the ballad in question is neither antiquarian artifact nor popular street song but artfully contrived pastiche. This self-conscious mode of genre performance had its roots in such eighteenth-century ballad "scandals" as Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw's "Hardyknute."2 Ballad forgeries turned eventually to avowed imitations, and, after picking up sentimental, romance, and gothic elements from Thomas Chatterton, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and many others, the literary ballad had thoroughly saturated the literary field by the early decades of the Victorian period.
This essay explores the ballad aesthetics inherited by Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites and, more particularly, those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a less-remarked influence on Pre-Raphaelite medievalism. The ballad in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was less a stable form than an evolving discourse-an overlapping assembly of ballad collections and antiquarian scholarship that gathered together metrical romances, broadside ballads, ballad romances, hymns, lays, ballad parodies, and lyrical ballads that variously expanded and chastened the idea of the ballad....