author
William Francis Barnard
An American poet with a strong social conscience, he wrote verse that blends lyrical feeling with a clear sympathy for working people. His surviving books move between reflective, personal poems and more openly labor-centered pieces.
1 Audiobook
The tongues of toil, and other poems
by William Francis Barnard
About the author
William Francis Barnard was an American poet, listed by LibriVox as living from 1840 to 1903. His work survives mainly through early twentieth-century collections including The Moods of Life (1905) and The Tongues of Toil, and Other Poems (1911; second edition 1913).
Barnard’s poetry ranges widely in tone, but the thread that stands out most clearly is his interest in labor, justice, and ordinary human dignity. In the foreword to The Tongues of Toil, he presents the book as an effort to express “the spirit of the great cause of labor,” and says that this cause inspired him more than any other source of creative work.
That gives his writing a distinctive place among public-domain poets: he was not only writing about feeling or nature, but also about workers, social struggle, and the hope of a fairer world. Reliable biographical detail on his personal life appears to be scarce, so he is best known today through the poems themselves and the ideals they champion.