Ballad

A folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some popular story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend.  

The story is told simply, impersonally, and often with vivid dialogue.  

Ballads are normally composed in quatrains with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, the second and fourth lines rhyming (see ballad metre); but some ballads are in couplet form, and some others have six-line stanzas.  

Appearing in many parts of Europe in the late Middle Ages, ballads flourished particularly strongly in Scotland from the 15th century onwards. Since the 18th century, educated poets outside the folk-song tradition---notably Coleridge and Goethe---have written imitations of the popular ballad's form and style: Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798) is a celebrated example.  

The art of composing ballads is called balladry, as is any large corpus of ballads. For a fuller account, consult G.Malcolm Laws, The English Literary Ballad (1972).