Background
Barnes was born at Rushay in the parish of Bagber, Dorset, the son of a farmer.
philologist priest writer poet
Barnes was born at Rushay in the parish of Bagber, Dorset, the son of a farmer.
His formal education finished when he was 13 years old.
After village schooling and employment with a Dorchester attorney, he conducted his own school and was later ordained a priest of the Church of England. Barnes mastered many languages and took to writing most of his poems in Dorset dialect, which attracted him not only as his childhood speech but also as a survival of the West Saxon form of Old English. The dialect collections of Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1844, 1862) and Poems of Rural Life in Common English (1868) gained him a reputation as one of the purest lyrical poets of the century. Yet for all their freshness, his best love poems, such as "In the Spring, " "The Wind at the Door, " or "Heedless o' My Love, " owe much to a rare scholarship of lyrical form. His poems influenced Thomas Hardy. Gerard Manley Hopkins, who called Barnes a "perfect artist" and likened him to "an embodiment or incarnation or man muse of the country, " contrasted him with Burns to the latter's disadvantage. Barnes' lyricism endured into his old age; he died in his vicarage at Winterborne Came, Dorset, on October 7, 1886, not long after writing his last poem. Few Victorians maintained a style so free from literary compromise; and if this poet of pure feeling also wrote slightly perverse books on philogy, words were at any rate his proper poetic passion. His art is discussed by Thomas Hardy in Select Poems of William Barnes (1908) and by Geoffrey Grigson in Selected Poems of William Barnes (1950). The Life of William Barnes (1887), by his daughter Lucy Baxter, remains for all its shortcomings the best account.
William married to Julia Miles, the daughter of an exciseman from Dorchester.