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Ballad

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Poems by African American writers using the Ballad form. Ballads are here defined as popular narrative poems that use rhymed quatrains, with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines.

Lewis Turco, in The Book of Forms, describes Ballads as follows: 

“The ballad is a relatively short lyric verse tale meant to be sung. There are distinctions to be made between literary ballads and folk ballads; the latter were passed down through oral traditions from balladeer to balladeer (a wandering minstrel, gleeman, jongleur, minnesinger, bard, or scop—an old English court or household poet-harpist-singer)." (Turco 2020, 352)
 

This page has paths:

  1. Poetic Form in African American Poetry Amardeep Singh

Contents of this tag:

  1. Countee Cullen, "The Ballad of the Brown Girl" (1927)
  2. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, "The Dying Bondman" (1895)
  3. Georgia Douglas Johnson, "Companion" (1925)
  4. Frances E.W. Harper, "The Martyr of Alabama" (1895)
  5. Katherine D. Tillman, "Clotelle--A Tale of Florida" (1902)
  6. Frances E.W. Harper, "Home, Sweet Home" (1895)
  7. Walter Everette Hawkins, "Wail on a Wicked Bachelor" (1909)