Romanticism and the folk tradition: William Blake to John Clare

Nineteenth century

William Barnes, ‘My Orcha’d in Lindèn Lea’ ("Linden Lea"); ‘Blackmwore Maidens’ ("Blackmwore by the Stour"), ‘The Spring’ ; ‘The Winter’s Willow’

George Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (2002)

John Clare, selected poems

David Morley, 'Wisdom Smith Pitches his Bender on Emmonsales Heath, 1819', from The Gypsy and the Poet (2013)

Early twentieth-century

S. Baring Gould, Cecil J. Sharp, English Folks Songs for Schools (1920)

Cecil Sharp, One Hundred English Folk Songs (1916)

Ralph Vaughan Williams Folk Song Collection (the Vaughan Williams Folk Song Collection)

Ralph Vaughan Williams, English Folk Songs (1959); listen to samples here

Further reading

Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology & the English Folk Revival (2010)

Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp: His Life and Work (Faber, 2008)

Thomas McKean, The Flowering Thorn: International Ballad Studies (Utah State University Press, 2003)

James Reeves, The Idiom of the People: English Traditional Verse from the Manuscripts of Cecil Sharp (Faber, 2008)

Steve Roud and Julia Bishop, ed., The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (2012)