SOURCE: "William Barnes: 1800-1886," in The Mint: A Miscellany of Literature, Art and Criticism, edited by Geoffrey Grigson, George Routledge and Sons Ltd., 1946, pp. 72-101.

In the following excerpt, Grigson evaluates Barnes's collected works of poetry and speculates on the influence of his verse.

[William Barnes's] first book was Poetical Pieces, printed for him in Dorchester in 1820—ten poems in ordinary English. He was then twenty years old, and there is nothing much to mark in these conventional album verses but their neatness, and the fact that he began to write in normal English, and for many years continued to do so. Orra: A Lapland Tale, Dorchester-printed in 1822, is worth more. It stands to his later writing like Gebir to the rest of Landor, or Midnight Crabbe, or A Vision of The Mermaids to the rest of Hopkins, and it came partly out of his reading of Joseph...