[Mike Todd]

My latest read is Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction. I like it a lot and am wondering which of his other books might be worth parting with cash for. I'd welcome suggestions from Barfieldophiles.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Well, my fellow book collector, though I cannot give you suggestions on this author who is entirely new to me, I want to say thanks for previewing and recommending another book on the craft. I will note the title.

Could you please tell us why you found it helpful and a little bit about the contents. (I know, I know, Amazon is only a click away, but "from the horse's mouth", seems more trustworthy!

[Mike Todd]

Sure, I'll write something up this weekend, time permitting. Howard Nemerov had this to say about it (on the back cover): "Among the few poets and teachers of my acquaintance who know Poetic Diction, it has been valued not only as a secret book, but nearly as a sacred one." And there's a paragraph about it on the wikipedia page for Owen Barfield.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Ba...Poetic_Diction

[Cally Conan-Davies]

He is one of my favourites, too, Mike and Janice.

Janice, basically Barfield defines poetic diction as ""When words are selected and arranged in such a way that their meaning either arouses, or is obviously intended to arouse, aesthetic imagination" (PD XXX).

I don't have the book at hand - only the notes I took from it while doing my thesis. Barfield discusses poetic diction as involving a real, felt change of consciousness and strangeness.

Look forward to reading more of your thoughts, Mike.

Cally

[R. Nemo Hill]

Barfield's Orpheus: A Poetic Drama is another book of his that is quite celebrated. I have a copy from Lindisfarne Press. To tell you the truth, I wasn't as impressed with it as I thought I might be, though I always felt as if I were perhaps missing something. That was some years back and the ground may be prepared differently now for its mustard seed.

Nemo

[Andrew Frisardi]

Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry is a classic. Barfield pretty much stands on its head the modern scientific paradigm. His book on Coleridge, I hear, is excellent as well, which doesn't surprise me since he thinks a lot as Coleridge did. I haven't read that one though.

[Mike Todd]

Janice—

My review will have to wait. I'm mired in chapter 5, Metaphor. I can't seem to grasp the point. I'm convinced that Barfield has contradicted himself and, even worse, whole paragraphs of the chapter are written in Latin and French. I may have to resort to typing them into a translation engine.

[Alder Ellis]

Hi Mike,

I assume you mean chapter 3, which is "Metaphor"?

Anyway, it's been a long time, but I went back & reread Ch. 3. The argument perhaps seems more convoluted than it really is. The upshot is usefully summarized in the ensuing chapter:

"We must, therefore, imagine a time when 'spiritus' or pneuma . . . meant neither breath, nor wind, nor spirit, nor yet all three of these things, but when they simply had their own peculiar meaning, which has since, in the course of the evolution of consciousness, crystallized into the three meanings specified...."

And here's from another book:

"Nonfigurative language, on the other hand, is a late arrival. What we call literal meanings, whether inner or outer, are never samples of meaning in its infancy; they are always meanings in their old age -- end products of a historical process." (Speaker's Meaning, 58-9)

The phrase to conjure with in Barfield is "evolution of consciousness." Modern rational, scientific consciousness has evolved from an earlier form of consciousness in which the subject-object ("inner or outer") polarity, so pronounced & seemingly absolute in modern consciousness, was experienced differently, less antithetically, in the mode of "participation." Subject & object participated in one another's reality. Hence the possibility of a language in which the word pneuma comprehends the meanings "breath," "wind," and "spirit" without ever being reducible to any of them. The analysis of pneuma (breath) as being employed metaphorically for pneuma (spirit) is taken to be a retrospective construction of modern rational consciousness, misconstruing archaic participation as modern rationalization. It is a persistent naivety of modern rationalistic minds to suppose that archaic minds worked the same way our modern rationalistic minds work.

One of Barfield's main targets in "Poetic Diction" is the absurdity of rationalizing histories of language, according to which language started out abjectly literal & material (monosyllabic grunts signifying sensory experiences) and evolved into abstraction by means of conscious metaphorical plays on the original sensory signifiers. No (says Barfield), language started out with no differentiation between that & that. It meant inextricably both.

Upshot: the evolution of consciousness, which begins in the undifferentiated participation of subject & object, has as its goal what Barfield calls "final participation," which is when the exile, having learned his lesson, returns home. The exile is modern rational, scientific consciousness. It's a variation of the "felix culpa" myth: we fall from grace unconsciously so that we can return to grace consciously, thereby multiplying grace.

In short, Barfield is in the prophetic tradition. He has big fish to fry. The discussion of "poetic diction" is a pretext, although by no means an arbitrary one -- essential, rather. It leads directly to the real point.

Hope this helps.

[Mike Todd]

AE—

Yes, I did mean chapter 3. That just shows how confused I was.

Barfield is good, but he can take a long time to get to the point. Chapter 3 is an extreme case. The mistake I made was trying to understand it as I went, rather than just ploughing on to the end, where, as you point out, a handy summary exists which can be used to make sense of the rest of the chapter.

I'm on chapter 5 now. Yes, I do mean 5.