The Editors of Romanticism.xyz. Last reviewed: 13 June 2026.

The Romantic Ballad: Folk Song, Supernatural Narrative, and the Poetic Revival

“It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?’” — Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798

The Romantic ballad was one of the great literary forms of the early nineteenth century. The Romantic poets rediscovered the narrative folk song, adapted its conventions to their own purposes, and made the ballad one of the central vehicles of Romantic poetry. The great Romantic ballads — Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, Goethe’s Erlkönig, Pushkin’s narrative poems, the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge — became some of the most widely read and most influential works of the Romantic period. The ballad revival also gave birth to the modern discipline of folklore and shaped the Romantic conception of the poet as a kind of national singer and interpreter.

The Ballad Before the Romantics

The ballad had a long pre-Romantic history. In the English-speaking world, popular ballads had circulated in manuscript and in print for centuries, telling stories of love, betrayal, murder, the supernatural, and tragic destiny. The most famous collections of pre-Romantic ballads include:

Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) — a hugely influential collection of ballads, romances, and historical songs that helped launch the ballad revival.
Joseph Ritson’s collections of English and Scottish popular songs, including the Robin Hood ballads.
Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–03) — a major collection of Scottish border ballads.
Thomas Evans’s and Joseph Ritson’s collections of Welsh, Irish, and Scottish material.

The continental ballad tradition was equally rich. The German Volkslied, the Scandinavian ballad tradition, the South Slavic heroic songs, and the Spanish romancero all provided important material for the Romantic poets.

The Romantic Ballad Revival

The Romantic poets took the inherited ballad tradition and transformed it. The great Romantic ballads are not simple imitations of folk originals but highly crafted literary works that draw on the resources of folk tradition while adding the new Romantic preoccupations with the supernatural, the psychological, the symbolic, and the political.

Some of the most important Romantic ballads include:

Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) — the great founding text of English Romantic balladry, a long narrative poem in ballad meter about a sailor who kills an albatross and suffers the consequences. The poem is a major statement of Romantic ideas about sin, redemption, nature, and the human relationship to the natural world. The page on Wordsworth and Coleridge treats the collaboration that produced the Lyrical Ballads of which the Ancient Mariner is the most famous poem.
Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819) — a short, haunting ballad of a fairy woman who enchants and abandons a knight. The poem’s compressed, dreamlike intensity has made it one of the most anthologized poems in the language.
Goethe’s Erlkönig (1782) — a German ballad in which a father rides through the night with his sick son, who is pursued by the Erlking, a supernatural figure who calls the child to come with him. Set to music by Schubert, Loewe, and many others, the poem is one of the supreme achievements of the Romantic ballad tradition.
Pushkin’s narrative poems — including Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820), The Bronze Horseman (1837), and the Polish songs. Pushkin was deeply influenced by the English and German ballads and adapted their conventions to Russian material with extraordinary success.
Lermontov’s The Demon (1829, published 1856) — a Russian Romantic narrative poem of demonic love.
Scott’s “Lochinvar”, “Proud Maisie,” and other ballad-like lyrics in the Marmion and The Lady of the Lake.

The Convention of the Ballad

The Romantic ballads drew on a set of inherited conventions:

Ballad meter — typically four lines with the rhyme scheme abcb and the meter of roughly 4-3-4-3 stresses per line.
Ballad stanza — the common meter hymn, with alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.
Incremental repetition — the repetition of lines with small variations to advance the narrative and intensify the emotional effect.
Refrains — repeated lines that punctuate the action, often with a haunting or incantatory quality.
The supernatural — the frequent appearance of ghosts, fairies, demons, witches, and other supernatural figures.
The tragic or unhappy ending — the typical Romantic ballad ends in death, abandonment, madness, or some other tragic destiny.
The unnamed or archetypal characters — many ballads feature characters who are called by titles (“The Ancient Mariner,” “La Belle Dame”) rather than by proper names, giving them a universal or symbolic quality.

The Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge

The single most important event in the Romantic ballad tradition was the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. The volume, published anonymously, was the result of a close collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge. Coleridge contributed the more supernatural and “romantic” poems (chief among them the Ancient Mariner), while Wordsworth contributed the more ordinary, “natural” poems, including “The Thorn,” “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” “Lines Written in Early Spring,” and “Tintern Abbey.”

The 1800 second edition of Lyrical Ballads included Wordsworth’s famous preface, which became one of the central documents of Romantic poetic theory. In it, Wordsworth described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and proposed that the language of poetry should be a “selection of the real language of men.” The preface established the new Romantic conception of the poet and the poem that would shape the entire century.

The Ballad as Folk-Study and National Project

The Romantic ballad revival was closely connected to the new interest in folklore, philology, and national culture. Herder’s Voices of the Peoples in Songs (1778–79) and the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales and folk-song collections helped establish the ballad as a national treasure and a source of national identity. The Lyrical Ballads were inspired, in part, by this same national-folk project.

The Long Influence of the Romantic Ballad

The Romantic ballad tradition shaped almost every major development in English-language poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Victorian ballad revival (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, the Pre-Raphaelite ballads), the American folk ballads and literary ballads of the nineteenth century, the modernist ballads of Yeats and Auden, the contemporary ballad tradition — all draw, in different ways, on the Romantic inheritance. The supernatural ballad, the tragic ballad, the ballad of love and death — these are all forms that the Romantic poets helped establish and that continue to be written, performed, and read in the present day.