Reinventing the Local: Neologism in William Barnes

At the heart of William Barnes’s best-known poetry is a set of contrasts: rural life as marked by both nostalgic inertia and fluid vitality, linguistic strangeness as both forbiddingly disorienting and tantalizingly half-familiar, speakers as both generic and idiosyncratic. Critics have tended to approach these defining issues by focusing on the poet’s use of Dorset dialect. However, I argue that they are best understood by carefully assessing not only Barnes’s regionalisms but also his overlooked neologisms. After explaining the ideological basis of this poet’s tendency to coin words, I demonstrate how his invented terms can elucidate the interlinked debates above — and, in the process, can shed new light on Barnes’s conception of his authorial identity.