SOURCE: "Poems of Rural Life: 1844-1846," in William Barnes: A Life of the Dorset Poet, The Dovecote Press, 1985, pp. 106-22.

In the following essay, Chedzoy studies Barnes 's Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, recounting the subject matter, technique, and critical reception of this collection.

The culmination of Barnes's life as a poet came as early as 1844 when the Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect was first published. Though he was to write much more poetry, and was to make second and third collections of his Hwomely Rhymes, the nature and range of his art as a dialect poet was substantially established by 1844. The first edition ran to 373 pages of which 240 were devoted to the dialect poems, but they were sandwiched between a 37 page Dissertation and nearly 100 pages headed 'A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect of the English Language.' Every page bespeaks a...