Christopher Stokes W.

William Hazlitt had concluded in 1815 that a Quaker poet would be ‘a literary phenomenon’ – how could a marginal sect renowned for their plain dress, sober ways and proscription of pleasures produce imaginative literature? To conceive such a writer would be a paradox. Yet the career of Bernard Barton, a prolific poet of the 1820s and 1830s, presented the Romantic era with just such a phenomenon. Instantly recognisable to his contemporaries as the Quaker poet, Barton drew on the styles of the...