Selected Poems of Bernard Barton, the 'Quaker Poet'

Description

The first ever modern edition of Bernard Barton's selected verse, recovering an important and prolific figure from the Romantic era. Instantly recognisable to his contemporaries as 'the Quaker poet', Barton wrote nature and landscape poetry in a distinctive vein, as well as spanning strikingly diverse themes that engaged politics, society and religion. This selection encompasses all these tones and genres, providing freshly edited texts from the first printed sources, supplemented by textual apparatus, critical commentary and informative footnotes. The book also includes a selection of contextual material, including prefaces and reviews, as well as a selection of Barton's lively epistolary correspondence. A substantial scholarly essay serves as the introduction, describing Barton's life and career, as well as analysing his uniquely Quaker poetic identity in its full literary and historical context.

Dr Christopher Stokes is a senior lecturer in romanticism at the University of Exeter.

'A Quaker poet would be a literary phenomenon', said William Hazlitt in 1815, and in his own day Bernard Barton was exactly that. Christopher Stokes's richly annotated edition is a welcome opportunity to rediscover a remarkable - and remarkably versatile - lost voice of British Romanticism. - Thomas Keymer, Chancellor Henry N.R. Jackman University Professor of English, University of Toronto