Abstract
This paper undertakes to study The Ballad of the White Horse as an excellent modern Imitation of the old folk ballad whose primitive spirit Chesterton recaptures through his exultant Christianity. It attempts to show that the transcendence of The Ballad of the White Horse over most ballad poetry lies in the sublimity of its theme — the triumph of Christianity over paganism. |There are two kinds of ballads, the folk and the literary. The folk or popular ballad belongs to the childhood of literature. Theodore Maynard says, "The ballad is poetry as an infant, and is full of a charm that maturity cannot hope to regain."