Singing School

This chapter recovers conversations in Rapallo about the ballad form and how it could be “made new.” It looks closely at the Rapallo poets’ ideas about Robert Burns as a “national poet” and as an important innovator of the ballad form. The chapter considers the political and literary implications of the ballad for the Rapallo poets, looking at the “democratic” ballads of Basil Bunting’s early poems and at the politically complex broadside ballads that W.B. Yeats produced for Cuala Press. The chapter also examines Burns’s emphasis on poetry as a celebration of life, which appealed to the poets of Rapallo in their mobilization against the growing threat of literary censorship in Ireland.