SOURCE: “The Ballads and Literature,” in The Ballads, W. W. Norton and Company, 1962, pp. 140-50.

In the following excerpt, Hodgart examines how broadside ballads went from being considered “low art” in the seventeenth century to being a form that was embraced by British literary masters such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge by the end of the eighteenth century.

The ballads have taken a great deal from learned literature, and … many of them show the hand of skilled poets. Throughout Europe there has been a continual movement of motifs and forms from the poetry of the élite into folk tradition. But there has also been a movement in the opposite direction. The ballads have exerted an influence on learned literature during at least the last four centuries, and they have been important in the history of taste, and above all in the history of Romanticism.

They made...