Remarks by Frederic William Moorman

“Piers the ploughman must once more become the hero of song, and Saul Kane, the poacher, must find a place, alongside of Tiresias and Merlin, among the seers and mystics.”

Labouring and outlaw figures belong in the same company as mythic seers · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

“The time may not be far distant when England will again become what it was in Elizabethan days—a nest of singing birds.”

Hope that minor voices may swell a national chorus once more · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

“One main object of the present enquiry is to show that the poetic interpretation of Nature did not begin in the eighteenth century.”

Resisting the idea that earlier poets used landscape only as scenery · Essay, The Interpretation of Nature in English Poetry

“Our English poets, from Old English times onwards, have lived nearer to Nature than those of any other nation of modern Europe.”

English verse as a long companionship with the outer world · Essay, The Interpretation of Nature in English Poetry

“Fear is a resourceful demon, with whom we are engaged in perpetual conflict from the cradle to the grave.”

Fear as a shape-shifting adversary that outlives each victory over it · Prose tale, The Inner Voice

“It is hardly necessary to state that Yorkshire has produced neither a Robert Burns, a William Barnes, nor even an Edwin Waugh.”

Honest about the absence of a single commanding dialect genius · Introduction, Yorkshire Dialect Poems

“In volume and variety the dialect poetry of Yorkshire surpasses that of all other English counties.”

A historian of the vernacular staking Yorkshire's claim · Introduction, Yorkshire Dialect Poems

“In my choice of poems I have been governed entirely by the literary quality and popular appeal of the material which lay at my disposal.”

Merit and welcome, not linguistic rarity, decide inclusion · Preface, Yorkshire Dialect Poems

“I believe that the volume which the reader now holds in his hand is the first which is made up entirely of poems written in broad Yorkshire.”

Announcing a collection devoted wholly to the county tongue · Preface, Yorkshire Dialect Poems

“In the creation of this poetry of the people, by the people, dialect may well be called upon to play a part. Dialect is of the people.”

Local speech as a fitting instrument for popular verse · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

“Let democracy look to William Morris, poet, artist and social democrat, for inspiration and guidance.”

Morris as model for an art belonging to ordinary people · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

“Democracy, having obtained for the working man a place in the government of the nation, is now asserting his claim to a place in the temples of poetry.”

Political citizenship should be matched by a place in literature · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

“It is time that the working men and women of England were made partakers in this inheritance of wealth and joy.”

Poetry as shared wealth rather than a closed estate · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

“In my dialect wanderings through Yorkshire I discovered that while there was a hunger for poetry in the hearts of the people, the great masterpieces of our national song made little or no appeal to them.”

Standard English verse can leave the hungry unfed · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

“My purpose throughout has been to hold a mirror up to Nature, to give a faithful interpretation of thought and character, and to show my readers some of the ply of mind and habits of life that still prevail among Yorkshiremen whose individuality has not been blunted by convention.”

Dialect monologue as a true likeness, not a comic turn · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

“Among Yorkshire farmers, farm labourers, fishermen, miners and mill workers I discovered a vitality and an outlook upon life of which I, a bourgeois professor, had no previous knowledge.”

An academic admitting how much the Ridings taught him · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

“A literature which leaves large areas of the national activity and aspiration unexpressed is in danger of becoming narrow, esoteric, unhealthy.”

Art that ignores labouring life impoverishes the national spirit · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

“The working man needs something more to sustain him than bread and the franchise and a fair day's wage for a fair day's work.”

Political rights and wages are not enough without a share in art · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

“It should be the aim of the writer of dialect verse to bring poetry out of the coteries of the people of leisure and to make it dwell in artisans' tenements and in cottagers' kitchens.”

Poetry as a household inheritance rather than a drawing-room privilege · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

“This anthology has not been compiled for the philologist, but for those who have learnt to speak broad Yorkshire at their mother's knee, and have not wholly unlearnt it at their schoolmaster's desk.”

Claiming dialect verse for native speakers rather than for specialists · Preface, Yorkshire Dialect Poems

“At first my object was purely philological, but soon I came to realise that men and women were more interesting than words and phrases, and my attention was attracted from dialect speech to dialect speakers.”

A scholar of folk-speech turning from vocabulary to the lives of the speakers · Preface, Songs of the Ridings

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