Lewis Discusses Modern Ballads

The "singing line" when used in the modern ballad can express basic mysteries of modern life, C. Day Lewis said last night in the third of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures.

Ballads before the invention of printing, and since then in the folk song tradition, owe their power to an accompanying tune, the British poet said. He explained that music carried the story, while rapidity of action created a cinematic effect by "brilliant pacing of graphic detail."

Lewis said written ballads and other lyric poems have often successfully transformed this "story lyric" without using a tune, "although it helps if you have a folk tune in your head." He quoted poems from Yeats, Graves and Auden as examples.

But Lewis cautioned modern poets against misusing other techniques, as Scott and Tennyson did. Too much sensibility can destroy the ballad's austere but intense story line, and too much self-consciousness or psychology can make it overly cruel or moralizing, he said.

"Bricked Over"

While oral ballads expressed the animism and mythology of the peasantry, today's ballads can in the same way explore "the wells of mystery bricked over" in our consciousness, Lewis said. He noted America's revival of folk music, and the popularity of comic strips and tabloid newspapers, both of which are similar to ballads in technique and content.

"We have to avoid condescension and not value the ballad for its quaintness," Lewis said. "It is still very much alive."