Tom Burton - Hearing is Believing: The Dialect Poems of William Barnes (1801–1886)
Duration: 1 hour 9 mins
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About this item
| Description: | Tom Burton presents poems of William Barnes. |
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| Created: | 2014-09-18 16:04 | ||
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| Collection: | Clare Hall Colloquium | ||
| Publisher: | Clare Hall | ||
| Copyright: | Clare Hall | ||
| Language: | eng (English) | ||
| Keywords: | English poetry; dialect; English literature; | ||
| Credits: |
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| Abstract: | William Barnes’s Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect have consistently been admired by his fellow poets and by the most discriminating critics: in his own day (to name only a few) Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins; in ours Philip Larkin, Andrew Motion, and Christopher Ricks.
“I cannot enjoy one poem by Shelley and am delighted by every line of William Barnes,” wrote W. H. Auden, “but I know perfectly well that Shelley is a major poet, and Barnes a minor one”. If Barnes’s poems delighted him so much, why was Auden so sure that he was “minor”? And if one shares Auden’s delight in the poems, what can one do to persuade a sceptical public that it’s high time Barnes was recognized as being about as major as they come? |
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