SOURCE: "Hardy's Friend William Barnes," in Celebrating Thomas Hardy: Insights and Appreciations, edited by Charles P. Pettit, Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996, pp. 68-89.

In the following essay, Levi describes Barnes's life and the enduring power of his poetry.

That Wessex which we call Hardy's Wessex is only an idea of course. There is something magical or fey about the maps of it that Hardy began to publish in 1895, but they do represent something real—a dialect, the boundaries of a way of life—and it was undoubtedly that deeply original, deeply provincial poet William Barnes who first established it as a literary province. Tennyson talked of Wessex dialect: he got some notes on it from Thomas Hughes of Uffington, and used them in the dialect scenes of his play Becket, where they make a preposterous impression, which the dialect poems of Barnes never did. I have argued in a...