Classic Ballads: 4 Timeless Books of Traditional Songs

British and Irish Folk Songs, Romantic Verse, Supernatural Tales, and Historical RomanceBy William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, John Fletcher, Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Cowper, Robert Burns, William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Moore, Robert Browning, Oliver Goldsmith, James Hogg, William Blake, John Keats, Lord Byron, Lord Tennyson

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Length20h 58m

About this audiobook

Classic Ballads: 4 Timeless Books of Traditional Songs gathers the ballad tradition in its capacious literary afterlife: tales of courtship, betrayal, warfare, supernatural encounter, exile, and communal memory appear beside lyric meditations and narrative poems shaped by popular song. Its range extends from orally inflected refrains and border legends to Gothic visions, Romantic reverie, dramatic monologue, and Victorian narrative verse. Particularly compelling are the collection's haunted landscapes, outlaw figures, and songs of national memory, which reveal how traditional forms continually invite formal renewal. The volume brings together writers associated with the Scottish and English ballad revival, Romanticism, and nineteenth-century literary culture. Poets, dramatists, and novelists draw on folk idioms, regional histories, medievalism, and vernacular speech while testing the relation between inherited song and individual authorship. Across these varied contributors, the ballad becomes both archive and experiment: a vehicle for preserving communal tradition, questioning political and social authority, and rendering intense psychological experience in memorable narrative forms. Recommended for students, scholars, and general readers of poetry, this anthology offers an unusually rich encounter with the many lives of traditional song. Reading across its four books illuminates changing ideas of nation, history, voice, and popular culture, while the juxtaposition of styles fosters a lively dialogue between folklore and literary art. It is an invaluable single-volume map of the ballad's enduring imaginative power.

Audiobook details

GenrePoetry

Length20 hrs 58 mins

Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices

FormateBook with Audio

Publish dateMar 4, 2025

LanguageEnglish

1Old Ballads

18SHALL I, WASTING IN DESPAIR

2Old Ballads

19GO, LOVELY ROSE!

3COME, LASSES AND LADS COMIN' THRO' THE RYE CHERRY-RIPE ANNIE LAURIE ROBIN ADAIR MOLLY BAWN GO, HAPPY ROSE! THE ANCHOR'S WEIGH'D ALICE GRAY HOME, SWEET HOME JOHN ANDERSON, MY JO MY PRETTY JANE ROCK'D IN THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP THE MINSTREL BOY ON THE BANKS OF ALLAN WATER AULD LANG SYNE WITHIN A MILE OF EDINBURGH TOWN THE NIGHT-PIECE TO JULIA TOM BOWLING MY LOVE IS LIKE THE RED RED ROSE WIDOW MALONE THE JOLLY YOUNG WATERMAN CALLER HERRIN' A HUNTING WE WILL GO HEARTS OF OAK THE FINE OLD ENGLISH GENTLEMAN THE BAY OF BISCAY O! BLACK-EYED SUSAN DUNCAN GRAY THE BAILIFF'S DAUGHTER OF ISLINGTON THE MILLER OF DEE THE ANGEL'S WHISPER SIMON THE CELLARER AULD ROBIN GRAY BONNIE DUNDEE SALLY IN OUR ALLEY KITTY OF COLERAINE HERE'S TO THE MAIDEN OF BASHFUL FIFTEEN THE LEATHER BOTTEL WOODMAN, SPARE THAT TREE THE TOKEN O WERT THOU IN THE CAULD BLAST THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE LOVELY NAN THE LASS OF RICHMOND HILL TELL ME NOT, SWEET SHE WORE A WREATH OF ROSES O NANNY, WILT THOU GO WITH ME? D'YE KEN JOHN PEEL?

20BOADICEA

4THE LEATHER BOTTÈL.

21THE PIPER

5Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance

22THE BLUE BELL OF SCOTLAND

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6PREFACE

23THE VICAR OF BRAY

7BALLADS IN THE THIRD SERIES (pt. 1)

24THE FLOWERS OF THE FOREST

8BALLADS IN THE THIRD SERIES (pt. 2)

25THE PARROT