SOURCE: "The Dorset Poet," in William Barnes: The Man and the Poems, Longmans (Dorchester) Ltd., 1960, pp. 1-152.

In the following excerpt. Levy discusses the importance of nature in Barnes's poetry.

Nature

Emerson calls the sky the daily bread of the eyes, and so it and all present nature were to Barnes. He did not write of the sea nor of great mountains, for he was not familiar with them. Rather, he selected those details on which with delicacy of perception he lovingly lingered, and composed them into vignettes of unmistakable authority. They have the freshness necessary to arrest the most jaded and outrageously stimulated city dweller, and their accuracy stems from a desire to present without diminution of the Creator's intention those works for which man is not responsible: to capture, if possible, the "calm of blest eternity."¹ These songs of purity and innocence are not naive; they...