What is most encouraging is
to find that the book has found an entrance into the homes of Yorkshire
peasants and artisans where the works of our great national poets are
unknown. I now essay the more venturesome task of publishing dialect
verses of my own. Most of the poems contained in this little volume have
appeared, anonymously, in the Yorkshire press, and I have now decided to
reissue them in book form and with my name on the title-page.
A generation ago the minor poet was, in the eyes of most Englishmen, an
object of ridicule. Dickens and Thackeray had done their worst with him:
we knew him--or her--as Augustus Snodgrass or Blanche Amory--an amiable
fool or an unamiable minx. The twentieth century has already, in its
short course, done much to remove this prejudice, and the minor poet is no
longer expected to be apologetic; his circle of readers, though small, is
sympathetic, and the outside public is learning to tolerate him and to
recognise that it is as natural and wholesome for him to write and publish
his verses as it is for the minor painter to depict and exhibit in public
his interpretation of the beauty and power which he sees in human life and
in nature.
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