“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

• Democracy
• Poetry
• Work

“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

• Experience
• Humility
• Work

“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

• Literature
• Society
• Work

“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

• Democracy
• Poetry
• Work