Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning

One who reads Poetic Diction from the vantage of this historical perspective is due for a truly astonishing experience. Barfield seems to anticipate the intellectual history of the more than sixty years which separate his book from us. He has fully synthesized literary and cognitive theory. At a stroke he rejuvenated and educated the romanticism of the early century. He explains how imagination discovers truth and formulates it into valid conceptual structures. He fully realizes that such a formulation implies the building and changing of those structures and accounts for this with “evolution of consciousness.” But the evolving mind in no sense creates the reality it perceives; it rather discovers what is implicit in “spiritual reality” through an act of imagination. The changing of language reflects exactly these shifting structures. Poetry allows us not merely to perceive this evolution abstractly but to relive it through our imaginations. The experience of poetry is not so much the proof of Barfield’s theory as it is the immediate perception of the reality he delineates. What Barfield presents as an essay on poetry is in fact a fully “diachronic” theory of human cognition. His contemporaries could not comprehend what he had done. They could not even perceive the problem he attempted to solve. We can see the problems very clearly indeed, but we as a culture have not fully considered Barfield’s contribution to their solution. Perhaps his voice sounds to us as though it comes from a rather distant and somewhat romantic past; it actually calls from a future of greater maturity and hope than we can recognize through the din of our adolescent loneliness and anger. If Barfield’s theory is correct, then he should expect to gain more listeners as we “mature.” The development of such schools as cognitive science, structuralism, phenomenology and deconstructionism, which all seem strangely consonant with Poetic Diction, is evidence that the times now may be Before the New Criticism: Barfield’s Poetic Diction in Context 29 better attuned than they were in 1928 to appreciate the intricate harmonies of Barfield’s thought.

Like Veronica Corningstone I too practice non-regional diction, so I picked up Barfield's book to brush up. Turns out this book is about the study of meaning (right there on the cover). It is an in-depth and scholarly look at the use of poetic diction to essentially transfer old ideas into new understandable language as time passes. The idea that there is nothing new under the sun, we must find better methods of communicating our ideas to one another.

there is a reason Owen Barfield was a member of the Inklings... this book proves his prowess in the theory of Poetic Diction. Who says new is better - in thought this is one of the best texts I have read on the theory of Poetry and why it matters! If you have more than the average interest in poetry this book is a must read... as well as a text every teacher should read (close reading a necessity or you will miss- interpret the author). I know I can hear John Ronald Reuel Tolkien saying "you must have had too much port... but it is true this is probably one of the best theory's of poetry I have read - just to warn you I was excited that I found the Elter Edda sagas and Younger Edda Sagas at a garage sale (translated and edited to English by another Oxford Scholar!

Written in 1928, the book is outdated - one doesn't know the authorities he quotes from or whether their ideas are considered valid anymore. Furthermore, there are passages in French, Italian, Greek, and Latin which are untranslated. Barfield assumes the reader has a command of these languages as well as being familiar with the state of affairs of linguistics 90 years ago.

Impossible to read. It’s like Shakespeare but more confusing.

Excellent book, excellent author!!!

By his own admission, Owen Barfield's writings can't be organized into "early" and "late" periods. He claimed that from the very first publications to the last, he was explicitly or implicitly working out his understanding of the evolution of human consciousness. His second published book, _Poetic Diction_, concerns the study of language as the record of the changing human experience of the world.In _Poetic Diction_, Barfield argued that: 1. One defining effect of poetry is to "arouse aesthetic imagination" 2. A significant result of the interaction with the language of the poem is that the reader's awareness of the world is permanently expanded 3. The expansion of the reader's awareness correlates to the poet's own awareness of the world as articulated in the poemBarfield supposed, further, that what may be prosaic to the author may still have a "poetic" effect on the reader, i.e., expanding the reader's awareness of the world. One consequence of these facts, Barfield argued, is that by reading, the reader perceives the world as the author perceives - or perceived - it. And if the text being read is a classical Latin text, or a Sanskrit text, for example, then the reader may experience very startling glimpses of the world as a result.What he went on to argue was that, if we grant that this effect of poetic diction on our awareness of the world is a real effect, then we cannot escape the conclusion that the world as the authors of the Latin and Sanskrit texts was a very different world than our own. Further, he argued that one could trace those differences in the changes that languages have undergone since human languages have been recorded. Finally, by studying these changes, said Barfield, one sees that human consciousness in its first expressions in language was almost wholly perceptual and figurative.Barfield then argued that the "poetic effect" of such ancient texts was that they make available to the reader an experience of the world that correlates to their concrete and figurative language, and that world is one that couldn't have been produced analytically and self-consciously - for instance, by superstition or some early attempts at scientific theorizing. Just as our language today expresses in myriad ways what we take to be real, so the ancient languages too.Thus Barfield's conclusions about *poetry* are nothing at all like what contemporary academic literary theory concludes, because Barfield's conclusions are equivalent to a theory of knowledge - while contemporary literary theory denies implicitly that a theory of knowledge is even possible.As literary theory, then, _Poetic Diction_ is only marginally relevant, if even that, because literary theorists no longer concern themselves with knowledge. As a theory of knowledge, and as a study of the significance of language and the evolution of human consciousness, _Poetic Diction_ remains a seminal work, the challenges of which have yet to be realized in but a few works even today.