Barnes, William | Alan Hertz (essay date 1986-7)
Alan Hertz (essay date 1986-7)
SOURCE: "Exile in Eden: William Barnes's Lyrics of Romantic Encounter," in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2, Winter, 1986-87, pp. 308-18.
[In the following essay, Hertz analyzes the imagery and versification of Barnes's romantic lyric poems.]
Despite its overwhelming lushness, a poem by William Barnes often seems strangely artificial, a kind of verbal topiary. Isolated in an anthology, its self-consciously limited vocabulary and rich, stylized imagery can appear merely an eccentric and unproductive impoverishment of the medium. Seen in the proper context, however, it stands revealed as part of a large and interesting literary enterprise. The poems I call lyrics of romantic encounter—those about unexpected meetings with irresistible women—undergo just such a transformation. On their own, they seem no more than highly wrought curiosities, but the appearance of superficiality is misleading,...
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