Lot 9: BARNES (WILLIAM)

Autograph sonnet signed ("W Barnes"), entitled "The Wind", opening: "Life of the world, that roamest on unseen" and apostrophising the wind as "welcome flood of life", one page, laid down on an album leaf, one or two fox-marks in margins, 4to

RARE: although six letters by Barnes have appeared at auction since 1982, no poetical manuscripts are listed in ABPC. This attractive manuscript is a good example of Barnes's hand, as described by Peter Croft, writing of a similar manuscript at the Dorset Country Museum: 'In his youth Barnes wrote the rather colourless schoolroom "copperplate" of his generation: the ungainly hand of his maturity...possesses a bold and unselfconscious individuality which compensates for its lack of formal beauty" (Autograph Poetry in the English Language, 1973, 111).