SOURCE: Preface to Select Poems of William Barnes, edited by Thomas Hardy, Humphrey Milford, 1908, pp. iii-xii.

In the following preface to Select Poems of William Barnes, Hardy explores the unique character of Barnes's dialect poetry.

This volume of verse [Select Poems of William Barnes] includes, to the best of my judgement, the greater part of that which is of the highest value in the poetry of William Barnes. I have been moved to undertake the selection by a thought that has overridden some immediate objections to such an attempt,—that I chance to be (I believe) one of the few living persons having a practical acquaintance with letters who knew familiarly the Dorset dialect when it was spoken as Barnes writes it, or, perhaps, who know it as it is spoken now. Since his death, education in the west of England as elsewhere has gone on with its...