William Barnes

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Barnes, William (1801–86), West Country poet and schoolmaster, was ordained in 1848, and took up the living of Whitcombe, moving to Cambe in 1862. He waged a lifelong campaign to rid English of classical and foreign influences, suggesting many ‘Saxonized’ alternatives. Orra, a Lapland Tale appeared in 1822 and his Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect in 1844; Hwomely Rhymes followed in 1859 and Poems of Rural Life, written in standard English, in 1868. His collected dialect poems appeared as Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect in 1879. He wrote textbooks, a primer of Old English (Se Gefylsta, 1849), Philological Grammar (1854), a Grammar…of the Dorset Dialect (1863), and other works reflecting his interest in philology and local history.

According to his many admirers, who included Tennyson, G. M. Hopkins, Hardy, and Gosse, Barnes was a lyric poet of the first rank, but the difficulties presented by the Dorset dialect have greatly restricted his audience and contributed to the image of a quaint provincial versifier. His poems evoke the Dorset landscape, country customs (as in ‘Harvest Hwome’ and ‘Woodcom' Feast’), and happy childhood, although his few poems of grief, such as ‘Woak Hill’ and ‘The Wind at the Door’, written after the death of his wife, are among his best. The wide variety of his verse forms much intrigued Hardy; his noun-combinations (‘heart-heaven’, ‘sun-sweep’, and ‘mind-sight’) foreshadow Hopkins.

BARNES, William [1801–86]. English schoolmaster, clergyman, dialectologist, and poet, born in Dorset of a farming family. In addition to textbooks, grammars, and articles on etymology, philology, archaeology, and local history, he produced a primer of OLD ENGLISH (Se Gefylsta, 1849) and collected dialect material. Most of his poetry was in DIALECT. He wrote two grammars and glossaries of the Dorset dialect, which, together with Philological Grammar (1854), compared features of STANDARD ENGLISH and the Dorset dialect with those of other languages. As a teacher and clergyman, he was distressed by the intricacies of English vocabulary, blaming its shortcomings, as he saw them, on its HYBRID nature. He set out therefore to counteract the classical influence. He revived Old English usages, such as hearsomeness and forewit to replace obedience and caution, drew on dialect, using fore-elders and outstep to replace ancestors and remote, made LOAN TRANSLATIONS from other Germanic languages, such as birdlore and speechlore to replace ornithology and grammar, and coined new words on VERNACULAR principles, such as birdstow and beestow to replace aviary and apiary. Although his PURISM had little impact, it was comparable to that in other parts of 19c Europe.

William Barnes 1801–86, English poet and philologist. After a career as a schoolmaster, he took holy orders in 1847. He is best known for his poems in Dorset dialect, which began to appear in local newspapers in 1833. His Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect were published in three series between 1844 and 1862. Besides a Philological Grammar (1854), he wrote other books on the English language.

Bibliography: See his Selected Poems (ed. by G. Grigson, 1950).