INTRODUCTION The intellectual vision of Owen Barfield, like his life, spans most of the twentieth century. In the acuity and rigor of his analysis, in the breadth of the materials he encompasses, Barfield is un- equalled among his contemporaries. Our century, limping to its close in the shrouds of irony and indeterminacy, has worked hard at marginalizing Barfield. And it is true that his audience is relatively small. But itis an intensely admiring audience, one which responds actively to Barfield’s insistent call to rediscover meaning, to rec- ognize and reinvest in the spiritual in the life of man and in nature. There may in fact be something of a cult of Barfield, especially in America, largely (but not exclusively) academic, largely (but by no means wholly) teachers of literature and cul- tural studies. There is also a smaller, happier group of men and women who have experienced in person the warmth, the wit, the generous humanity of the man. Some of these are students and academics from America and Canada; the luckiest are his friends. This anthology is presented to both of these groups and toa larger audience. To that combined audience we offer a selec- tion of poetry and fiction by a distinguished man of letters, imaginative writing that developed through the years alongside his critical writings, most of which embody those major themes. The virtually unknown pieces we present here reflect the so- phistication of a classical education, of practicing literature for seventy-five years, of reading, interpreting, and rediscovering, of reclaiming origins as well as expanding frontiers. Our prima- ty criterion for selection was literary value. Secondarily, we chose pieces that helped expand and illuminate the career and canon of a major thinker, a canon at once various and subtly homogeneous. Barfield’s thinking has always been clearly ex- pressed, elegantly honed and unpretentious, even at its most difficult. But the man loves language and revels in its uses. (‘Words are my specialty,” he says in a recent letter.) He has Copyrighted Material 12 A BARFIELD SAMPLER explored those uses in most of the traditional genres, and some invented forms, with joy, even abandon: who's for the open Lift of a language Laced with verbs, not frightened of consonants, or Juxtaposed stressed syllables, fit for breathing, Harshly sweet, strong, quantitatively trim, loud, Shoutable English? (“Al Fresco”) The exuberant voice of the poet here and in the numerous poems on poetry included herein, enriches his lifelong discus- sion of “the felt change of consciousness”? and the steadily em- phasized subject of language in the philosophical works. We hope that our readers will agree with us that these poems and stories and the two prophetic nouvelles expand, illustrate, and challenge the great themes of the major works. € Owen Barfield was born in 1898 into a predominantly secular family. Asa child he absorbed the skepticism of his parents, and as a boy observed his mother’s ardent feminism with detach- ment, a detachment that grew later into distaste. Barfield’s per- sonal discipline was shaped by this rather rigorous and intellec- tual family life. (He tells us that he took the hated daily cold baths his mother prescribed into young manhood.) But there are tender and loving portraits too, of his mother in “The Silent Piano” and, more ominously, in “Medusa”; and of his sister, who was partially deaf, in the unpublished novel, English People. In that novel, in the character of Janet Trinder, Barfield explores to an unprecedented extent the terrible experience of stammer- ing. His own boyhood stammering sometimes drove him to welcome the idea of death in his sleep rather than facing school the next day. Out of profound experience of language depriva- tion, Barfield will emerge as the century’s philosopher of the Word. Because we still await a definitive biography, we briefly note here the middle-class upbringing, his attendance at Highgate School (Coleridge was buried in the crypt of the school chapel), Copyrighted MaterialIntroduction 3 and his early emergence as a poet and a boy of letters. His first published poem was “Air-Castles,” written while still at school but published in Punch when he was nineteen.? Highgate also gave him one of the great friendships of his life, with A. C. Harwood, whose brief but elegant memoir gives us intimate touches of the young student who “made no attempt to win favour with the Establishment” but who “was always regarded as an exceptional person. . . . an eager collector of flowers, and a great lover of the stars.” We are told too that as a young man Barfield was an excellent gymnast, a serious dancer who once thought of making dancing his career. During the early twenties he met and later married Maud Christian Douie, a talented dancer and designer who had worked and studied with Gordon Craig. Barfield’s friends will especially remember Harwood’s last sentence: “But all who have known him personally will wish to record also their profound admiration and love for him as a man.”4 Barfield served in the British Army before entering Wadham College, Oxford, which he attended from 1919 to 1923. While at Wadham, he met C. S. Lewis (who was at University College), and they developed a deep and lasting friendship. That friend- ship is best described, largely in Barfield’s own words, in G. B. Tennyson’s Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis.5 Any Barfield biogra- pher or editor faces a problem with regard to his relationship with the immensely popular Lewis. On the one hand, the friendship provides an entry point to a larger audience for a Barfield whose seriousness is less available than that of his friend; on the other hand, the pairing of the two seems too often to be posed as a paradigm of success and “failure” with an audi- ence. Lewis’s books, obviously different in kind, have sold in the tens of millions, and Barfield’s—at best—in the tens of thou- sands over a period of decades. Yet commentators—one thinks immediately of Lionel Adey and R. J. Reilly—who know the work of both men will suggest the subtler tone, the deeper thought of Barfield. We mention this only as a bit of literary history and a factor in the Barfield enigma. The friendship enriched both men intellectually. The special generosity of both shows in Barfield’s comment: “[Lewis] says in Surprised by Joy that he believes I influenced him more than he influenced me. If that is true, which I very much doubt, it is Copyrighted Material4 A BARFIELD SAMPLER because he made it possible.”” Professionally, the men were separated, with Lewis at Magdalen College, Oxford (1925-54) and later at Cambridge, and Barfield (who never held an English academic position)’ in London, and for many of his later years in Kent. His was an unusual kind of isolation. The young man of letters of the nineteen twenties met with too little financial suc- cess to maintain that career. Despite considerable publication— The Silver Trumpet (1925) (a fairy tale written before the mythic fiction of Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams), History in English Words (1926), Poetic Diction (1928), and numerous poems, stories, and essays and reviews—a career as a self-sustaining writer did not materialize. The extraordinary novel, English People, was the test case for Barfield. Initially well received by a German publisher and described in some detail before publication,? the novel was never printed and exists now only in an incomplete manuscript version. By the end of 1930, Owen Barfield joined his father’s of- fice as solicitor, a profession he practiced for almost thirty years. The daily pressures of a professional life which one dislikes are described, often quite frighteningly, in many of the poems we print. In his critical works, these pressures are difficult to imagine; in the poetry and fiction they are palpable. Rhythms of obtrusive noise, meaningless repetitions of motions and words, overwhelming congestion, intrusions on the private self, the sense of wasting and waning time—these provide occasions, sometimes elegant, sometimes harsh, for urban despair of the sort we immediately recognize as twentieth century: They build in Station Road. A Kango hammer Pounds in the scantlings, like a straining heart. Drowning the drills’ pneumatic stammer, Great buses stop and start. The poem ends darkly: Who shouts? A dog snaps. Fret not so For silence. It will come. (“Bad Day”) Owen Barfield was experiencing the urban atrocities of noise (to which he was and is unusually sensitive) and congestion, tech- nological intrusions on privacy and human relationships. The relentlessness of his “professional” life, along with other pres- Copyrighted MaterialIntroduction 5 sures, led him to the verge of a nervous breakdown—a break- down averted, he tells us, by the catharsis of his charming auto- biographical novel, This Ever Diverse Pair (1950). In this narrative the musing solicitor is shown in his two faces—Burgeon the poet and Burden the practical man of vocation; this small imbedded lyric suggests how Barfield wittily managed his depression: Burgeon: The little waves on London River Are bombed with light: they flash and quiver And laugh and toss back to the Giver His shattered shards. They dance their dance. Burden: I dance my dance too in that station To which He called me—litigation To gild the tide of fornication, Leases, and lusts, and loan-finance.10 Barfield’s career in law came to an end or nearly so in 1959, following the publication of his acclaimed Saving the Appearances two years before.'! He was soon to embark on another career as a British man of letters. Sought-after by American universities in the early 1960s and 1970s, he became a visiting scholar, a teaching professor of phi- losophy and religion, language and philosophy, or English and American literature (according to the university). Barfield was also a guest lecturer at various conferences during those de- cades, including conferences focusing on his work at California State, Fullerton, and Baruch College of City University of New York. His last sojourn in America before his retirement from distant traveling was in the spring of 1981, at which time he was a guest lecturer at four American universities in the short stay of a few weeks. It was during these years that Barfield made and kept many friends, some of whom, including students, made visits through the years to his home in Kent, and a few of whom made lengthy summer visits until his departure to East Sussex. A tribute to Barfield’s achievements, a session sponsored by Christianity and Literature at the 1982 MLA Convention in Los Angeles, brought together many admirers of his books, bothold and new. Those familiar with his critical works feel certain, along, with R. J. Reilly, that when “the literary history of our time is written and influential critics are discussed, Barfield surely will be mentioned as a matter of course.”1? Copyrighted Material6 A BARFIELD SAMPLER Thinking back to the young Barfield of the early 1920s from this vantage point in time, we see that Barfield made right deci- sions about his literary career. In 1923, with the publication of “Day” in The Best Poems of 1923 and the acceptance by T. S. Eliot of his first short story “Dope” for publication in Criterion,1> Bar- field’s literary career looked promising. But even as he recorded the futility of modern life in “Dope,” Barfield was finding his larger subject—the recovery of the spirit in man and nature. Ina letter to T. S. Eliot in March 1924, he records his decision not to rest in lament: Iam a little tired of literature which can do nothing but point out ironically that there is nothing much going on but disin- tegration and decay.14 This was a rather bold statement to an author who had published The Wasteland two years earlier. Barfield had in fact burned some very important bridges by the time he was in his mid-twenties. Having made an initial entry into the world of fashionable letters with poetry and prose, he then proclaimed himself a maverick both stylistically and in terms of subject matter. Barfield embraced romanticism at a time when it was widely seen as “spilt religion” (the phrase is T. E. Hulme’s).15 Most significantly, he became an avowed disciple of Rudolf Steiner and a leading member of the Anthroposophical Movement. This commitment to Anthroposophy is profound and central to Barfield’s career. It has touched all his mature work and has also been a powerful determinant of the way in which his reputation has been spread and the ways it has been contained or minimized. What follows is a brief introduction to Barfield’s central argument on the evolution of consciousness. € In Romanticism Comes of Age, the best statement of his debt to Steiner, Barfield writes of his early arrival at “a fairly well consid- ered theory of poetry as a means of cognition”: without any particular exertion or theorizing on my part, [had had two things strongly impressed on me, firstly, that the poetic or imaginative use of words enhances their meanings and secondly that those enhanced meanings may reveal hith- erto unapprehended parts or aspects of reality. Copyrighted MaterialIntroduction 7 But it was during his serious reading in Steiner in the early 1920s that he came to realize that what he found there bore out his own theory but at a higher level of cognition: so far as concerned the particular subject in which I was im- mersed at the time, that is the histories of verbal meanings and their bearing on the evolution of human consciousness, Stei- ner had obviously forgotten volumes more than I had ever dreamed of. It was no “special treatise on semantics or semasiology among his works” that brought such insight, but rather it was a matter of stray remarks and casual allusions which showed that some of my most daring and (as I thought) origi- nal conclusions were his premises. (p. 13) Moreover, in Steiner’s teachings Barfield verified his own thoughts on the evolution of consciousness—a subject at the heart of his philosophy and one from which all else springs. We find this concisely put in his commentary on Steiner's thoughts: “That human consciousness is perpetually evolving was, of course, Steiner's perpetual theme” (p. 72). One might add that the evolution of human consciousness is Barfield’s perpetual theme. From his earliest studies in philology he found that lan- guage itself is the concrete evidence of this evolution: “language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man’s soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.”!7 However influential Steiner’s teachings were, inspiring Bar- field to higher levels of cognition, he remained his own thinker, as Steiner would have wanted.!8 One might say that, through his study of Steiner, Barfield as “Thinking” man came of age. His lifelong dedication has been to restore meaning to our very exis- tence and to that of nature. To a book, his purpose is to bring the modern mind to higher levels of thinking and thus to free it from the materialistic literalism that has taken it prisoner (albeit to our own unawareness) and to convince us of the need to change our habits of thinking. Those minds ready for change and unafraid of challenge will find his books useful Baedekers. One fundamental misconception that Barfield insists we rid ourselves of is the assumption that through the long ages man has always thought as we do now, has always perceived his world as we do today. This is to misunderstand the past. We are simply Copyrighted Material8 A BARFIELD SAMPLER another period in history. Ours too will give way to another. C. S. Lewis, in his prefatory tribute to his good friend in The Alle- gory of Love, states that Barfield “taught me not to patronize the past, and has trained me to see the present as itself a period.” The all-importance of this lesson for Lewis one gathers from his subsequent remark: I desire for myself no higher function than to be one of the instruments whereby his theory and practice in such matters may become more widely effective.!? Once we intellectually grasp this we—like Lewis—are already looking at the world differently and questioning our ingrained habits of mind. The medievalists did not see their world as we see ours. Theirs was one of wholeness. As Barfield says, it was “more like a garment men wore about them.””° Ours is one of fragmented individualism and indifference, an age besotted with material possessions. To understand that thinking and perceiving have evolved and will continue to do so is to better understand our place in the evolution of consciousness and why changes in our ways of thinking are necessary to heal our troubled lives and world. Intrinsic to biological evolution is the evolution of con- sciousness. Human consciousness, through the vast stretches of time, has evolved from a total immersion in its physical and spiritual environment to our present-day alienation from na- ture and from the numinous. Then, there was no distinction between itself and the phenomena, between self and not-self. This unselfconscious stage Barfield calls “original participa- tion.”21 When homo sapiens gradually perceived the phenom- ena (momentarily at the outset) and began to move from the original unselfconsciousness to individuation, language and myth arose.2? As human beings perceived more and more and named what they perceived, including the numina (considered first to have had a momentary flickering in their dreamlike consciousness), they became more aware of themselves as de- tached from nature, distinct from the phenomena but not sepa- rated. Despite this ever-growing awareness by humans of themselves in relation to the universe, there nonetheless re- mained a symbiotic relationship. The Spiritus mundi still ob- tained. The old world view still held in varying degrees until Copyrighted MaterialIntroduction 9 the early seventeenth century. What occurred between this long-held view of wholeness and today’s view were the philos- ophy of Rene Descartes—with its separation of mind from mat- ter, of the perceiver from the perceived—and the later Darwini- an hypothesis of a mindless evolution of matter. Equally responsible for the change in thinking, and parallel- ing Cartesian philosophy, was the rapid advancement of early modern science of which Francis Bacon was the herald. He introduced and developed the inductive method of reasoning and the necessity of experiment as proof: Not only did he maintain that knowledge was to be valued for the power it gives man over nature. . . . but he practically made success in this aim a part of his definition of knowl- edge. In other words, not only ‘science’ but knowledge itself, that is, the only knowledge that is not mere trifling, is, for him—technology.?3 This revolution in thinking led to a mechanistic view of nature which has turned a living entity into a dead one with its insis- tence that only the observable in nature is important. Like a dead tree, nature has an outside available to empirical data but no inside. We are so used to taking as fact this view of nature as merely having a reality independent of us that we have all but forgotten its qualitative state (a view presently enjoying a certain revival in the books of the biologist Lewis Thomas and of the late anthropologist Loren Eisley). Barfield puts it to us bluntly: either we redress this distortion of truth or we further doom nature and ourselves. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind who thinks on it that nature is dying with our help. The evidence is everywhere. Rather than data, intuition and imagination are needed to start to remedy the ills. Certainly as destructive of holistic and imaginative thinking is the contemporary philosophy, offspring of logical positivism, which claims metaphoric language to be meaningless, since only statements which can be proven by observation or experi- ment have meaning. Such thinking ensures the death of the imagination—this ageless process of cognition, rooted in the origin of language, and far more indigenous to the human mind than the later development of logical thinking. In a brief discussion on imagination and the inadequacy of (indeed, the Copyrighted Material10 A BARFIELD SAMPLER fallacy of) scientific inquiry that seeks to make the world know- able through analytic data alone, Barfield closes: Only by imagination therefore can the world be known. And what is needed is not only that larger and larger telescopes and more and more sensitive calipers should be constructed, but that the human mind should become increasingly aware of its own creative activity.24 What Barfield asks of us is nothing short of a radical switch in our thinking: to see ourselves in a direct creator-relationship with Nature.?5 Since the adjustment is not easily done, we might get a foothold on such thinking by considering a rainbow. The one in the sky or the one we bring into being by watching the spray of our hose on a sunny day exists because of three necessary components: water, sunlight, and our eyes. Without our eyes, there is no such phenomenon as a rainbow. We participate in its creation, whether we know it or not. While the rainbow analogy is not difficult to grasp, what is harder is that we—representatives of humankind through the stages of evolution—give nature her forms as well as name them. Consider a tree (to borrow another analogy of Barfield’s). Its reality, according to quantum mechanics (one of the great giant steps in the history of physics), is nothing more than an energetic mass of swarming unseen quantum particles! We con- figure that tree. As Barfield put it of himself: “A tree is the outcome of the particles and my vision and my other sense perceptions.”?¢ In fine, the human mind, from early ages on, has given form to atomic structures, to the phenomena. To more easily grasp this, we might consider that infant stage when a baby first learns (unconsciously) to focus its eyes, when the blur of color and motion becomes a solid, seeable form. But what we should seriously think about is our own deva- stating creation from atomic particles or from some equally imperceptible base. Unless we start to think of nature as a sharer of our unconscious being and not as something out there, we will further our own destruction: The possibility of man’s avoiding self-destruction depends on his realizing before it is too late that what he let loose over Copyrighted MaterialIntroduction ll Hiroshima, after fiddling with its exterior for three centuries like a mechanical toy, was the forces of his unconscious mind.?7 In short, macroscopic nature is man’s unconscious mind. The cosmic consciousness, which informs all phenomena and from which rose our waking consciousness, is by definition nature’s inside as well as our inside or, to put it another way, our unconscious-ness. We have all but forgotten that nature has a consciousness, albeit unawakened. However we attempt to change our ways of thinking, to succeed is to restore the necessary wholeness between our selves and our world. Once we realize that a cosmic conscious- ness exists, that thinking “permeates the whole world and in- deed the whole universe,”?8 that thinking does not originate in the brain but uses that organ to develop and advance the intel- lect, then we are thinking a transpersonal reality, and in doing so, we will rediscover Meaning itself and restore meaning to our lives and to the life of nature. One impulse of this anthology is to negate indifference, to present a strenuous, complex argument for meaning in a world seeking—in rhythms ranging from hysteria to despair—some signs of meaning. Owen Barfield’s poetry and fiction stand on their own, but they are also rich and attractive vehicles for the dissemination of his ideas about the evolution of consciousness and the recovery of meaning. € Owen Barfield has been writing poetry for seventy-five years. His first published poem, “Air-Castles,” appeared in Punch in 1917. In the 1920s and 1930s there was a fairly steady publication of lyrics in small journals, most of which were asso- ciated with the Anthrosophical Society. There was some recog- nition, but on the whole, Barfield’s poetry received little atten- tion from the general literary public, though it had a small devoted readership among his fellow writers, including C. S. Lewis. Barfield’s poetry grew in the face of or even in despite of the literary climate rather than in the midst of it. There is there- fore a strong element of irony toward fashion, of defiance even, of positioning on the circumference of poetic practice, which is yet the felt center of poetic vocation for Barfield. In short, of the Copyrighted Material12 A BARFIELD SAMPLER more than two hundred poems which are preserved, fewer than a quarter have been printed, and those almost exclusively in small journals. Only “Day” was anthologized and received attention from a non-coterie audience. It wasn’t until 1983 that the verse drama Orpheus was published,?? even though it had been performed in 1948 and praised by Lewis, who compared its richness of verse forms to The Shepherd’s Calendar. The long narrative poem, “The Unicorn,” and the much longer “Riders on Pegasus” have never been published.°° The Barfield poetic canon remains unexplored to an extent unusual for a man of his literary influence. We print here a representative selection of Barfield’s verse, spanning forty-five years of creativity. With customary gener- osity, Mr. Barfield has helped us to choose and to order the poems. The order is not chronological, but readers will recog- nize thematic groupings, and clearly the first and last poems are thematic signposts. Barfield’s great subjects are represented here: the spiritual validity of man in nature, the complexity of human consciousness, the representative—and regenerative— power of human sexuality. But also here are the stresses and erosions of daily life, the heroic stance against compulsory triv- iality. Here too are vigorous defenses of the English language and its capacities and of a romantic poetic defiantly hurled in the face of a literary establishment described, fairly or unfairly, as desiccated, dour, and self-paralyzed. In the essay, “Poetic License,” written as preface to “Riders on Pegasus,” Barfield gives us his epitome of modernist poetry, imagined as a wed- ding photograph capturing: the willed inertia of the stolid couple.* ... This is not to imply that “phrasal” poets are themselves stolid. On the con- trary, it took a long preliminary training and, at the crucial moment, a great deal of grouping and focusing and viewfind- ing to produce precisely the lymphatic photograph now hanging over the mantlepiece in the furnished apartment.31 The severity of Barfield’s critique of modernism should not obscure the enthusiasm that major literary figures such as * Parodying T. $. Eliot’s addiction to what one of his critics had named “phrasal” poetry. Copyrighted MaterialIntroduction 13 Auden, Bellow, Eliot, and Nemerov have expressed for his thought.%? Yet the poems on poetry printed here—a substantial group—are evidence of the problematic of Barfield’s reputa- tion: here is a heralded man of letters, part of whose ceuvre is ignored, if not actually quarantined. The prose fiction we present here ranges over fifty years— from drawing-room ironies to apocalypse, from three early sto- ries through the Marchen which ends the unpublished novel, English People, and on to the 1975 novella, “Night Operation.” We here note, again briefly, Barfield’s initial success with “Dope” and the beginning of a definition of separation from the reigning style in “Mrs. Cadogan” (a story clearly alluding to the Bloomsbury group in less than flattering terms) and “The Devastated Area” (the dark imaginings of an ex-soldier and his inability to communicate the horror of war). “The Rose on the Ash-Heap” is a substantial fiction, even as it is truncated here, complete in itself and yet serving as capstone and climax of English People. Its extraordinary vision of the Fun Fair precedes Brave New World by at least a year, and another fiction with which it claims comparison, The Day of the Locust, by twenty years. “Night Operation” is a revision of “The Rose on the Ash- Heap” in several ways, but brought grimly up-to-date: the nightmare vision of 1930 has become the demi-probability of 1975. We restate our first sentence: Barfield’s intellectual vision spans the intellectual vision of the twentieth century, including its darkest corners. But the hope of the saving remnant illumi- nates all of his portrayals of the human condition. € This collection would not have been possible without the extraordinary cooperation of its source, Owen Barfield. Advi- sor, co-worker, and inspiration, he gave us generous access to all his papers and printed materials and, most important, ac- cess to his continuing wisdom and good sense. His kindness as our host in our long stretches at Orchard View in Kent was matched by geniality and loving warmth, as friend and preemi- nent good companion. Our researches were intense and plea- surable, divided by our interests. This division of labor is evi- dent in the preceding Introduction. Professor Hunter is Copyrighted Material14 A BARFIELD SAMPLER responsible for the middle section on Mr. Barfield’s philosophy and aesthetic theory; Professor Kranidas is responsible for the opening and closing sections on the biography and the creative work. We are fortunate in having further debts. Jeffrey Barfield was a gracious co-host at Orchard View and a facilitator of our work over many years. Jane Hipolito was enormously helpful and, with John C. Ulreich, gave encouragement and advice at several critical stages. A stern third reader from SUNY Press gave us good advice and encouragement. Thomas J. J. Altizer has steadily urged us to pursue our project and has offered suggestions, as have Aaron Godfrey and Joseph Pequigney. Irene Greenwood has cheerfully and efficiently prepared the manuscript. As always, her good taste and good sense improve what she touches. Paul Doyle, colleague and friend, has gener- ously prepared the Index for the book. For carrots, coffeecake, and other comforts we give loving thanks to Herb Hunter and Carole Kessner. NOTES 1. See for example, George Woodcock, “Romanticism: Studies and Speculations,” The Sewanee Review 88 (Apr.—June, 1980), 298-307. On page 302, Woodcock characterizes Barfield as “an English eccen- tric of considerable learning.” 2. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (London: Faber and Faber, 1928; reprinted 1952), 48. 3. “Air-Castles” (unsigned), Punch 152 (14 Feb. 1917), 101. 4. A.C. Harwood, “Owen Barfield,” in Evolution of Conscious- ness: Studies in Polarity, ed. by Shirley Sugerman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 32-33. Barfield’s lifelong friendship with Harwood is commemorated in The Voice of Cecil Harwood: A Mis- cellany, ed. by Owen Barfield (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1979). 5. Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. by G. B. Tennyson (Middle- town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989). See also C. S. Lewis, All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922-1927, ed. by Walter Hooper, Foreword by Owen Barfield (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jov- anovich, 1991). 6. See Lionel Adey’s comment in C. S. Lewis's “Great War” with Owen Barfield (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 1978); “That Bar- Copyrighted MaterialIntroduction 15 field’s thought is both more original and more profound I have come to believe while studying these controversies” (122). 7. Barfield on Lewis, 9. 8. Lewis proposed Barfield as his successor at Magdalen, and the Appointments Committee had approved the nomination. The invitations had already been sent out for the party celebrating his election when the news came that he had been blackballed. The party was held nevertheless. 9. Anthroposophical Movement 7 (August 1931), 133-36. 10. G. A. L. Burgeon [pseud], This Ever Diverse Pair (London: Victor Gollancz, 1950), 39; reprint (London: Floris Classics, 1985). 11. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, (London: Faber and Faber, 1957). 12. R.J. Reilly, “A Note on Barfield, Romanticism, and Time,” in Sugerman, op. cit., 183. 13. “Day” was first published in The Challenge, Feb. 9, 1923, 46, and reprinted in The Best Poems of 1923 (London: Jonathan Cape, n.d.). “Dope” was published in The Criterion 1, July 1923), 322-28. 14. For the exchange of letters between Barfield and Eliot, see Thomas Kranidas, “The Defiant Lyricism of Owen Barfield,” VII: An Anglo-American Literary Review V1, 1985, 23-24. 15. “Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.” T. E. Hulme, in Speculations, ed. by Herbert Read (London: Kegan Paul, 1936). Hulme died in 1917, and Specula- tions first appeared in 1924. 16. Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1944; new and augmented edition, 1966), 10. Further citations will be made parenthetically in the text. 17. Owen Barfield, History in English Words (London: Faber and Faber, 3rd reprint, 1969), 14. Over a half-century later, Barfield put it another way: “Language is, more than anything else, the vehicle of human consciousness, and if you want insight into human conscious- ness and its evolution, you will get it by studying what is going on, and what has been going on, within human consciousness, not by studying what goes on outside it.” “Two Kinds of Forgetting,” The Nassau Review IV, 1981, 3. 18. Inhis Introduction to D. E. Faulkner Jones, The English Spirit, 2nd ed. (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1982), Barfield identifies “the stance which Steiner himself wished to see adopted towards his writ- ings. Think my thoughts without believing or disbelieving them; ap- ply them to an area you know well; and see if they illumine it” (xi). 19. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), viii. Copyrighted Material16 A BARFIELD SAMPLER 20. Saving the Appearances, 94. 21. Ibid., Chapter 6. 22. For Ernst Cassirer, “they prepare the soil for the great syn- thesis from which our mental creations, our unified vision of the cosmos springs.” Language and Myth, trans. by Susanne Langer (New York: Dover Publication, 1946), 43. 23. Saving the Appearances, 55-56. 24. Poetic Diction, 28. 25. Analogously, atomic physicists of the disorderly quantum world, have long argued that the observer cannot be separated from the observed. John A. Wheeler puts it succintly: Nothing is more important about the quantum principle than this, that it destroys the concept of the world as ‘sitting out there’, with the observer safely separated from it by a 20 centimeter slab of plate glass. Even to observe so miniscule an object as an electron, he must shatter the glass. He must reach in. He must install his chosen measuring equipment. .. Moreover, the measurement changes the state of the electron. The universe will never be the same [be- cause it is composed of such unseeable elements, and to change one you affect the whole]. To describe what has happened, one has to cross out that old word ‘observer’ and put in its place the new word ‘participator’. In some strange way the universe is a participatory universe. (Quoted in Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, Oxford, En- gland: Fontana/Collins, 1976, 145). Barfield is no stranger to the new physics, a discipline he cites often in his works and which plays a major role in Unancestral Voice. While atomic physicists have found that the mind creates and conditions the micro-world of physics, Barfield has found that the mind creates and conditions the macro-world of our experience. The order of the uni- verse is the order of our own minds, a proposition yet in the thinking stage of the new physics. 26. Saving the Appearances, 16-17. 27. Poetic Diction, 36. 28. Romanticism Comes of Age, 226. 29. Orpheus: A Poetic Drama, ed. by John C. Ulreich, Jr. (West Stockbridge, MA: Lindisfarne Press, 1983). Ulreich’s Afterword is an important statement on Barfield’s work. 30. The Marion E. Wade Collection of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois is the American repository of Barfield material. The “Mother of Pegasus” (original title) typescript is on loan in the collec- tion. An annotated copy of “The Unicorn” is in the possession of Jeanne Clayton Hunter. Copyrighted MaterialIntroduction v7 31. “Poetic License,” manuscript version; delivered as lecture at SUNY at Stony Brook, October, 1981. 32. T. S. Eliot praised Barfield early and late. He accepted the early fiction “Dope,” was instrumental in the publication of Saving the Appearances and wrote a blurb for Worlds Apart: “An excursion into seas of thought which are very far from ordinary routes of intellectual shipping.” Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the Sixties (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1963). W. H. Auden wrote a Foreword to the revised edition of History in English Words (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967): “It is a privilege to be allowed to recommend a book which is not only a joy to read but also of great moral value as a weapon in the unending battle between civilization and barbarism” (12). Howard Nemerov wrote an Introduction to the 1973 edition of Poetic Diction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press) which includes this statement: “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” (1). Saul Bellow, who carried on an intense correspondence with Barfield in the mid- to late seven- ties, wrote for the jacket of History, Guilt, and Habit (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979): “A clear, powerful thinker, and a subtle one, Mr. Barfield is not an optimist, but he does believe that we can get out of prison—or the madhouse. Once you have recognized, appalled, that you are indeed behind bars you will passionately de- sire to get out.” Copyrighted Material