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Stevenson among the Balladeers

When Robert Louis Stevenson’s Ballads appeared in 1890, reviewers complained both about his decision to base two of the poems on Pacific legends, and about his ballads’ versification. This essay places Stevenson’s volume in the context of the late Victorian ballad revival, looking variously at poems by John Davidson, John Todhunter, and W. B. Yeats. It then argues that Stevenson does not simply match the ballad’s ancient or naive poetics to the so-called savages of the South Seas, but instead that his prosody struggles with incompatible social and aesthetic values: both ancient and modern, naivete and sophistication. A focus on poetics thus illuminates the political contradictions of these poems of empire.