This book is situated at the crossroades in research areas of literature and linguistics. This collection of essays brings to the forefront the many ways in which dialect is present in poetry and how it is realized in both written texts and oral performances.

Introduction Part I: Rooting dialects in late 19th century poetry 1. Foundations of English Dialect Poetry 2. The "boggle" in the "waäste": Meaning and mask in Tennyson's dialect poems 3. "Leave off trying to put the Robbie Burns' touch over me" - D.H. Lawrence's dialect poems Part II: British dialects in 20th-21st c. poetry 4. The Problem with Dialect Poetry 5. "Lumbs & Orts": Ted Hughes and Dialect 6. Under-Mining The Meaning: Women's Dialect Poetry and the 1984-5 UK Miners' Strike 7. "Yan Tan Tethera": The Uses of Dialect in Tony Harrison's Poetry 8. "Between memory and water"/ A phonetic analysis of Ian McMillan's evocation of life on the English canals in his "fruity Yorkshire Brogue." Part III: (Not so) new dialects in contemporary poetry 9. "Nae poet eer writes 'common speech', Ye'll fin eneuch o yon in prose": Scots and Scottish English from Robert Louis Stevenson to Tom Leonard 10. Not English: On the Importance of Dialect in Poetry in Ireland 11. "Sometimes I wanda / Who will translate / Dis / Fe de inglish?": Strategies for Transcribing Jamaican Creole in the Dub Poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah 12. Sloughing off Empire: "Multi-monolingualism" in Daljit Nagra's British Museum 13. Bringing Homer Home: Nation versus Birminghamisation in Two Vernacular English Iliads