William Barnes

William Barnes (1801–1886) was a Dorset schoolmaster, Church of England clergyman and philologist, born in the Blackmore Vale and rector of Winterborne Came from 1862 until his death, though he kept a school at Mere in Wiltshire for a dozen years before returning to Dorchester in 1835. Largely self-taught, he read across a long list of languages, from Greek and Hebrew to Welsh, Persian and Old English, and argued for a plainer English stripped of its Latin and Greek borrowings, a conviction that shaped his own verse. He began publishing dialect poems in the Dorset County Chronicle in the 1830s, and his first collection appeared in 1844. Gerard Manley Hopkins admired his ear, and Thomas Hardy, who knew him in Dorchester, edited a posthumous selection, Select Poems of William Barnes, in 1908.