SOURCE: Foreword to The Poems of William Barnes. Volume 1, edited by Bernard Jones, Centaur Press, 1962, pp. 3-22.

In the following foreword to The Poems of William Barnes, Jones surveys Barnes's life and work as a philologist and poet, particularly studying the nature of his dialect eclogues set in his native Dorset.

Since the publication of Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect in 1844, the name of William Barnes has seldom for long dropped out of publishers' lists. New editions of this book were published in 1847, 1862 and 1866. In 1846 his Poems Partly of Rural Life in National English was brought out; in 1859 Hwomely Rhymes. A Second Collection of Poems in the Dorset Dialect, which went into a second edition in 1863; in 1862 Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect. Third Collection, which went into a second edition in 1869; in 1868 Poems of Rural Life in Common English; in 1870 what Barnes...