Bebop Ballads
Emily Dickinson is often associated with the ballad form, and for good reason. Her small poems use a form and meter that she knew well from church hymns. (See our "Form and Meter" section for more.) At the same time, when you start to poke around in her poems, you start to realize that her poems tend to look like the proper ballads you might find in a church hymnal, but they actually act like unique jazz tunes, playing loose and fast within a pre-set structure. She changes rhythm and rhyme, then throws in some funky dashes and capitalization to keep her readers on their toes. Check out "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"or "A Route of Evanescence" for examples of this. Maybe Emily Dickinson is more like Miles Davis than people give her credit for.