The hylozoistic idea of matter as the visible side of everything there is attractive for the Romanticism’s mythopoetic concept of animated and dynamic nature of the universe and man as its projection. In this paper, the hylozoistic idea is interpreted in relation to Erben’s ballads. Two main research directions are outlined: the depiction of the Romantic landscape and its anthropomorphic incarnation through metaphorical rhetorics, and the genre specifics of the literary ballad. Its dominant place in the poetry of the first half of the 19th century is a reflection of the return to folklore and the mythological perceptions of the spiritual constants of life, so typical for this time. In the context of Erben’s poetry, the first aspect is visible most cleary in his ballad Záhořovo lože, while the latter one can be found in nearly all of his ballads where the real and the supernatural worlds meet. Instead of interpreting Erben’s poetry in the specific national context of the Czech Renaissance (an aspect that has been studied in detail by Czech scholars), our aim is to situate Erben’s poetic world and the genre model of his ballads within the European context. It is in this space that the hylozoistic idea proves very fruitful both for the Romantic writers’ concept of landscape and for their genre preference of ballad.