The Complete Poems of William Barnes

Tom Burton is a Professor of English at the University of Adelaide, where he has taught for many years. He was born in Barbados; 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 going to Australia in the mid 1970s. He has edited a popular book of knowledge in 15th-century English verse for the Early English Text Society, and has written two books for the general public on changing English. He has given lectures and seminars 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.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).

• INTRODUCTION; A DISSERTATION ON THE DORSET DIALECT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1844); POEMS IN THE 1844 COLLECTION; SPRING; SUMMER; FALL; WINTER; MISCELLANEOUS PIECES; A GLOSSARY OF THE DORSET DIALECT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1844; 1847); NOTES ON THE DISSERTATION; NOTES ON THE POEMS; NOTES ON THE GLOSSARY; APPENDICES

The Complete Poems of William Barnes: Volume 1 and the two volumes to come, will serve scholars admirably, consolidating Barness reputation both as a poet and as a scholar, and providing a solid and systematic foundation for new readings.