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