Complete Poems of William Barnes: Volume 2: Poems in the Modified Form of the Dorset Dialect

This is the second volume of Oxford’s three-volume edition of The Complete Poems of William Barnes. Volume II contains all the poems Barnes wrote in the modified form of the Dorset dialect that he used from the mid 1850s onwards: those in the second and third collections of his Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1859 and 1862); those from the first collection (1844), originally written in the broad form of the dialect and here re-written in the modified form); The Song of Solomon in the Dorset dialect (1859); poems published in newspapers and periodicals after 1855 but not included in any of his collections; and posthumously published poems surviving in manuscript. Variants are included from all surviving versions of the poems. There are two introductions, the first general and the second textual. Notes on the poems record their provenance, describe their prosody, and add contextualizing information. The volume concludes with discursive appendices on textual, literary, and dialectological matters, a list of references cited, an annotated glossary, a glossary of place-names occurring in the poems, and an index of titles and first lines.

T. L. Burton, Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, K. K. Ruthven, Emeritus Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and a Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide

Tom Burton is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Adelaide. He grew up on a farm in Shropshire; studied English at the University of Bristol; and taught for three years in secondary schools in East Africa and England before emigrating to Australia in 1974. He has edited a popular book of knowledge in 15th-century English verse, Sidrak and Bokkus, for the Early English Text Society, and has written two books for the general public on changing English, Words, Words, Words and Words in Your Ear (republished in one volume in the UK as Long Words Bother Me). He has given talks on Barnes’s poetry at many universities in the UK and USA and is a frequent speaker to literary societies, writing circles, U3A groups, and on radio. His William Barnes’s Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide was published in 2010, and his series on ’The Sound of William Barnes’s Dialect Poems’ is freely accessible online through the University of Adelaide Press.

K.K. Ruthven was educated at the University of Manchester, and became a Professor of English at the universities of Canterbury (New Zealand), Adelaide, and Melbourne. At Adelaide he edited Southern Review (1981-85), and at Melbourne a monograph series of introductions to recent theories and critical practices in the humanities and social sciences (19 vols, 1993-96). From 1983 until 2002, he was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, for which he organised a conference on new developments in the humanities, papers from which he edited as Beyond the Disciplines: The New Humanities (1992).