SOURCE: "William Barnes," in Art and Action, Methuen, 1965, pp. 30-46.

In the following essay, Sisson examines Barnes's life, his writings on language, and his poetry of rural life.

I

William Barnes came of the best blood in England, being the son of a small farmer in the West Country. Like many another in that countryside, the family was "down-start"—in his own language—being an off-shoot, or so he thought, of a gentleman's family of Gillingham in Dorset. That matters little enough, one way or the other. What does matter is that Barnes came from a stock neither high nor low, grown into the country like a tree-root. All distinctions of origin are on the way to being effaced, but there are still those who understand the intense pride of such birth, the furthest possible removed from pretension. In rural society it was a middle station; the gentry...