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William Barnes’s Economy
- The Cambridge Quarterly
- Oxford University Press
- Volume 41, Number 3, September 2012
- pp. 301-317
- Article
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C. H. Sisson identified William Barnes as ‘a figure of the sixteenth century rather than the nineteenth’, observing Barnes’s ‘ignorance of social drifts’. Recent criticism of Barnes has by contrast sought to demonstrate his poetry’s responsiveness to the rural poverty and upheaval experienced in Dorset in Barnes’s own lifetime. This article approaches the vexed question of Barnes’s social alertness by means of a consideration of the economy of his style, a style which characteristically draws on reticence and reserve for its peculiar expressiveness.