“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

“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

• Education
• Language
• Readers

“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