Francis Barton Gummere

Francis Barton Gummere (1855–1919) was an American scholar of English literature and philology, born in Burlington, New Jersey, into a Quaker family. After studying at Haverford, Harvard, where he worked with the ballad scholar Francis James Child, and in Germany, he taught English at Haverford College for more than three decades. He was a leading proponent of the theory that the earliest poetry and the popular ballads arose from the communal singing and dancing of the people, a view he set out in The Beginnings of Poetry (1901) and The Popular Ballad (1907). He also wrote Germanic Origins and translated Beowulf.