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Week 4

Romanticism and the folk tradition: William Blake to John Clare


Nineteenth century


William Barnes, Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1844); Hwomely Rhymes (1858)

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

John Clare, selected poems


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)


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)