SOURCE: "The Poetry of William Barnes," in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982, pp. 149-52.

In the following excerpted review of The Poems of William Barnes, originally published in 1962, Larkin discusses the positive aspects of Barnes 's use of dialect in his poetry.

It is little short of astonishing that we should have had to wait seventy-five years for the complete poems of William Barnes¹. When he died in 1886, as old as the century, his work was known and admired by Tennyson, Patmore, Hardy, Allingham, Gosse, Palgrave and Quiller-Couch, and when Bridges made a characteristic sneer at 'the supposed emotion of peasants', his correspondent, Gerard Manley Hopkins, replied sharply: ' I hold your contemptuous opinion an unhappy mistake: [Barnes] is a perfect artist and of a most spontaneous inspiration.' Nor was his appeal limited to men of letters: 'an old Domestic Servant' wrote to him...