is the fact that Edgar Guest wrote his poems in dialect, with deliberate misspellings and apostrophes replacing the G in words ending with "ing." The grammar, like the spelling, impersonates an unschooled, rustic speaker. Guest's lyric style is calculated to imply that uneducated country people have special access to wisdom and a special grasp of what's most important. His immense appeal for generations of readers was rooted in that populist idea, that true feeling and insight come from plain, unschooled country people. People in towns or cities who read Guest's work in the newspaper may have associated his poems with their farmer parents or grandparents.from Robert Pinsky: Slate: Speaking in Tongues
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