ABSTRACT
William Barnes's work, especially his poetry, constituted a myth of minor though not insignificant proportions, and of a thoroughness and consistency to be measured by the graceful strength of his verse. The close association between language and a particular way of life is important because it points to his continual concern with an organic wholeness of sensibility, whose image is the compactness and coherence of Barnes's conserving myth. Barnes's myth resulted, not from an involvement in revolutionary adaptation, but from a desire to preserve; he is not a nature poet in the sense commonly applied to Wordsworth, for example. Barnes's myth', to use T. S. Eliot's definition, is the manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.
