Barfield Scholarship
Essays, Book Chapters, and Monographs
on Owen Barfield and His Work

Tom Kranidas
The Defiant Lyricism of Owen Barfield

Over half a century has passed since the publication of Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction, one of the seminal texts on literary language. Almost thirty years have passed since Saving the Appearances, perhaps the seminal text on the evolution of consciousness. Yet, curiously, it is still necessary to establish the mere fact that Owen Barfield is one of the distinguished men of letters of our century, that he has a large and brilliant body of creative work which is virtually unknown. How can this be?

One of the reasons, perhaps the major one, is Mr. Barfield's extraordinary decision, made in the mid-nineteen-twenties, not to be "fashionable." He set out, rather, to counter the irony and despair, and the withdrawal, of a good part of English letters from an active love for nature, the human body, and what one can only call Spirit.

In a charming memoir, recently published,1 Barfield tells us how he first became aware, really aware, of metaphor. He was twelve years old. By the time he was seventeen, he was already a budding literary man, his first published poem appearing in Punch.2 Shortly thereafter he entered Wadham College, Oxford for a traditional course in "Greats" (Classics). Clearly the foundations for an English academic or literary career were solidly laid. That this career would not be conventional is indicated by the publication of his B. Litt. thesis: its title was Poetic Diction.

During the decade 1920-30, Barfield was a free-lance writer for several small magazines and newspapers. He published poems, stories, essays, a children's book, as well as two influential volumes on language, Poetic Diction and History in English Words. At one time it appeared he would emerge as a typical young literary man of the period, as when T. S. Eliot accepted his story "Dope" and published it in The Criterion.3 It is a well-written, ironic tale of a young factory worker whose dreary life is empty of all spiritual reality.

Eliot appears to have written in praise of the personal rhythm of the story and Barfield responded with considerable firmness in a letter to Eliot dated 30 April 1924:

In what sounds like a very strong editorial suggestion, Eliot replied on 14 May:

Eliot then gives reasons for rejecting "Mr. Cayley's Bet" which Barfield had submitted, condemning it for "a conclusion dangerously near to the worst tricks of Dickens and Thomas Hardy." He sums up:

If we consider that this exchange took place two years after the publication of The Wasteland, we can see the importance of Barfield's refusal to return to the style and to the despairing theme of the earlier story. He refuses to abandon his emerging sense of affinity with romantic structure and style. More importantly, he determines to abandon neutrality toward the spiritual desiccation of his time and toward the reigning styles which portrayed that desiccation.

This is not to imply that Barfield was henceforth ignored by T. S. Eliot, who generously praised Saving the Appearances. Nor do I wish to make that great poet appear monolithic in taste, or in range; his connections with the Oxford Romantics, especially Charles Williams, are well known. It is important to note, however, that Barfield, and several of the group around him, including C. S. Lewis, considered themselves isolated from both the developing naturalism of the English and American novel and the elegant ironist poets groping toward conversion in England and America. It is a fact that Owen Barfield worked hard toward establishing a neo-romantic style for himself from at least 1925 on.

It was not until 1930, when the brilliant and prophetic (and still unpublished) novel English People 5 was rejected, that he despaired of a professional literary career and became a solicitor, one of the startling and confusing factors in his career. As a professional solicitor who wrote brilliant books on language and consciousness, Barfield impressed the world as a gifted syncretist, a polymath who abstracted from his many-faceted interests a theory of the evolution of consciousness. In fact, Barfield was primarily a creator, not an analyst, a writer of considerable achievement, a poet whose experience with the creative process helped hugely to lead him into those inquiries which produced Poetic Diction, History in English Words, Saving the Appearances, What Coleridge Thought. Speakers Meaning, Worlds Apart. and History, Guilt and Habit. These books by their very distinction have, one hopes temporarily, obscured the complementary, in some ways superior, body of creative work which was both the seed-bed and the flower of the analytic work.

It is instructive to look first at an early lyric, a poem whose quality (and, in part, whose reception) heralded an important career. It is the poem "Day" published in The Challenge in 1923:6

The poem suggests prosodic sophistication, a calm mastery of form, and a powerful willingness to embrace the immanent spirituality of nature. There is also powerful fusion of the sexual and the spiritual which becomes one of Barfield's major themes:

He himself has said that the regeneration of sexuality is his second theme, after the evolution of consciousness.

The poem "Day" should have been the harbinger of a significant poetic career. It was in fact included in The Best Poems of 1923,7 but it has not been anthologized since. In fact, it seems to be the only poem of Barfield's to be anthologized to this day.

He was not, of course, alone, though for a major part of this work he was functionally isolated from his most important interests. For he had in C. S. Lewis an avid, appreciative, and acute reader as well as a fellow practitioner. And Barfield's quatrain reminds us of the special charm of that relationship between Poet Barfield and Critic Lewis:

My public, though select and small.
Is crammed with taste and knowledge.
It's somewhat stout and rather tall
And lives at Magdalen College.

Lewis was not his only reader. Richard Church and Ruth Pitter wrote warm appreciations.8 Walter de la Mare and Barfield occasionally exchanged poems, visits and letters,9 especially in the forties. The theme of these letters was often the verse of one or the other. In their biography of Lewis, Green and Hooper describe a luncheon party, with Barfield and Fitter among the guests, at which Lewis spoke of most "modern poetry" as a "cult engineered by cranks with money via Horizon";10 he went on to maintain that they could engineer a "Romantic Revival themselves--if they had the money to start and run a paper." Such a journal had been proposed earlier by Laurence Whistler "with T. S. Eliot sitting on the fence, metaphorically." Such a periodical, Lewis wrote in a memorandum, "ought to come before the public with no explicitly religious pretensions at all;. . . On the other hand, those who run it should in fact all be Christians."

I am not trying to defend Barfield's policy by quoting Lewis; rather to emphasize the strong sense of purpose and of isolation of a small group struggling to communicate. Barfield has told me of a reading of his play "Medea" to this group and the difficulty he had in getting through it because several of the others broke in to talk of their "Medea" poems. The charming story--and Mr. Barfield's memory is exact--suggests the exuberance and friendliness of the group and the sense of their being ignored by the reigning literary group. It also confirms what anyone who has looked into their work knows: the profound interest in myth per se.

Barfield's verse grew out of his classical English education. It developed at a time when the poetic tradition was being radically reshaped by poets like Yeats, Eliot and Pound, and critics like F. R. Leavis, who noted with supreme (self-) satisfaction Milton's "dislodgement" with "remarkably little fuss."11 The dominant mode was irony, rhyme was virtually abolished, and long poems were taboo. Most marked of all perhaps was the cool neutrality toward "spiritual" values; the very precision in describing the external tended to deny the internal. I am not presuming to "contain'" modern poetry; I want only to identify that governing mode insofar as it excluded and at once stimulated the Romantic Revival of which Barfield was a leading member, a revival which never quite revived. The little group did not go underground, but it did take a side street. And yet the writing continued (and still continues) and increased in skill and technical daring. Consider the technical suggestions that must have passed between the authors of Poetic Diction and The Allegory of Love. both of whom had been writing verse since childhood.

With the publication of Orpheus in 1983,12 Barfield's poetic oeuvre is finally being made generally available. This is an appropriate time to describe the poetic achievement as a whole so that there can be a beginning of appreciation. Here I can offer only a modest overview of Owen Barfield's poetry.

There are over two hundred lyrics, fewer than a quarter of them published in small journals. There are poems in many forms, including the much-favored sonnet, of which there are several series and a number of individual examples. There are dramatic monologues, Horntian metrics, ballads. There is a brilliant poem in three parts that dramatizes the idea of biblical typology in "Hagar and Ishmael." There is high literary comedy in "A Visit to Beatrice," a dialogue on the varieties of love between Dante's Beatrice and Moll Flanders. There are playful throw-away love poems and painful analyses of despair in doggerel forms, which increase the pain. There are celebrations of the religious holidays, often in terms dependent upon the emphases of the Calendar of the Anthroposophical Society. There are also long poems, the great Orpheus. which John Ulreich has labored so hard to bring us, the long poem "The Unicorn" and the even longer "Riders on Pegasus"13 in some 5,000 lines. The major themes are love, erotic and spiritual; nature. especially the immanence of spirit in nature; and poetry, the seminal power of the word. Often in these poems on poetry, Barfield returns again and again to the betrayal of imagination by modern English verse. There are other dark poems too, usually about the loss of personal love or- of the waste of time (a considerable minor theme is the amount of time consumed by the "necessities" of life). Death is in the poems, often beckoning. But there is a self-effected rescue, often in the face of despair (for which Mr. Barfield has a strong-willed contempt), of withdrawal, of beckoning and approaching death. The rescue is effected often through the medium of words which become the stuff of continuity, movement through time.

Escape

The music "deftly made/From its own woe, the world banished," becomes the friends and lovers who bear the speaker out into a natural and continuing world.

In the beginning was the Word. Barfield's reverence for language is his reverence for internal, that is, spiritual, meaning. His contempt for the merely external is expressed in a poem like this which starts as gentle self-satire of the bookworm and ends in condemnation of the modishly lean poets:

The contempt and disappointment are of course the other side of the coin from reverence for English. The sheer love of language can explode as in "Sapphics":

In the essay "Poetic Licence," written to preface "Riders on Pegasus," Barfield invents an image which for him epitomizes means and end of modernist poetry. Remembering the comparison with a wedding-photograph, we might perhaps think of phrasal poetry as "The willed inertia of the stolid couple", and we could do so without at all implying that phrasal poets are themselves stolid. On the contrary, it took a long preliminary training and, at the crucial moment, a great deal of grouping and focusing and viewfinding to produce precisely that lymphatic photograph now hanging over the mantelpiece in the furnished apartment. No verbs, but sterile substantives, in a kind of intellectual poverty. In the poem "Al Fresco" he again puts his case:

Al Fresco (on Modern Poetry)

The distaste for the mode seems to have grown most acute in the 1950's (perhaps at the climactic triumph of T. S. Eliot). Here is the "History of English Poetry in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century!" (with a question-mark at the end of the title).

History of English Poetry in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century?

The rescuers are the "cubital, corny, shrewd, root-labourers, quartz-frequenters," images from the anthroposophical vocabulary from which Barfield draws regularly. And surely one of the major areas of study in Barfield's poetry is its relationship to Rudolf Steiner's work and indeed his actual images. There are already workers in that field, primarily Jane Hipolito and Jeanne Hunter and I expect we shall be learning much from their work shortly. But my purpose here is overview, and I will return to the dark view of the modern literary scene which Barfield held in the fifties.

There was a flicker of hope in a charming poem on the accession of Elizabeth II:

The Queen's Beast
(1954)

The overall weariness with the dominant modern verse tradition of "solemn misery" remains. And so does the stubborn, even defiant faith in the spiritual source and value of language, its circumfluency, and its service as the medium of spiritual reality. Nature, personal human love and divine love exist together in language:

The poetry of Owen Barfield grew up In a counter-tradition that defined itself. at least in part, against the tradition dominant from 1920-1960, a tradition which in turn defined itself against Victorian and Edwardian models. Barfield flirted with the Eliot school but then rejected the mode of irony, weariness, and surface precision. His poetry and fiction developed alongside the poetry and prose of Lewis. Waiter de la Mare, Charles Williams, Tolkien and others, a self-conscious minority who, in fact, found themselves out of the mainstream. There is serious loss in this, for us, in that a substantial canon of fine verse has been virtually unavailable; and for Owen Barfield, who won the praise and criticism of C. S. Lewis. but might still have benefited from a wider critical reading. In this curious semi-isolation, sustaining himself in a profession alien to his primary interests. Barfield produced a body of long and short poems which engaged topics from myth in its widest sense--not anthropological but pure, as it were--which others had abandoned. His masterpiece is the verse drama Orpheus. But among his other papers there are a surprisingly large number of poems of extraordinary technical virtuosity and brilliantly, vulnerably ambitious themes. I conclude this survey with a poem from the 1940's, "The Coming of Whitsun":

The Coming of Whitsun

Notes

1 "Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language," Part One, in Towards I (June, 1978), 1-7.
2 "Air-Castles," Punch 152 (14 February) 1917, 101.
3 The Criterion, 1, July, 1923, 322-28.
4 All letters cited here are in the collection of Owen Barfield, Orchard View, South Darenth, Dartford, Kent, and are quoted with his permission. All Barfield material in this essay is copyrighted by Mr. Barfield and printed with his permission.
5 A copy of this typescript in in the Wade Collection at Wheaton College. Unfortunately, pp. 78-114 and p. 415 are missing from all known copies.
6 The Challenge, February 9, 1923.
7 The Best Poems of 1923 (London, Jonathan Cape), 1924.
8 From Mr. Barfield's private papers.
9 De la Mare's letters to Barfield suggest a firm friendship between poets working at their craft.
10 Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, New York and London, Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1974, p. 153.
11 F. R. Leavis, "Milton's Verse," Revaluations, New York, W. W. Norton, 1963 [first published 1947], p. 42.
12 Owen Barfield, Orpheus: A Poetic Drama, ed. with an Afterword by John C. Ulreich, Jr. (West Stockbridge, MA, The Lindisfarne Press, 1983). Reviewed in Seven, Volume V, by Barbara Reynolds, pp. 109-113.
13 In the Wade Collection under its original title, "The Mother of Pegasus."
14 All poems cited in this paper are from copies in Mr. Barfield's possession. Of poems cited the following have been published:

"Sapphics" in Nine, 3 December 1950, p. 39.

"History of English Poetry in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century?" Anthroposophical Movement, 28, July-August, 1950, 4-6.

15 On this poem C. S. Lewis comments, "Excellent in its kind. Try this on Punch." Manuscript note on copy in Mr. Barfield's possession.