I have always been assured by whatever text I've read about it that "Poetic Diction" is THE Owen Barfield book to read. I have enjoyed and fairly grasped his arguments in "Saving the Appearances" and "Studies in Words," and I was looking forward to a similar experience. I was grimly surprised.
Seldom have I felt like such a hill-country hick while reading a book, the technicality of it was so far above my pay grade. It assumed a familiarity with the works of other famous critics and their theories, had chunks of untranslated Greek (familiar, I'm sure, to Tolkien and Lewis) , and flowed on in sentences crammed with double-jointed terms that soon had my head spinning.
I closed the book in a sort of a daze. I was little wiser than when I had begun. I think I only truly understood two sentences, near the beginning, and that instinctively: "Meaning includes the whole content of a word, or of a group of words arranged in a particular order, other than the actual sounds of which they are composed. Thus, this book is concerned with a realm of human experience in which such an expression as 'prophets old' may, and probably will, 'mean' something quite different from 'old prophets'."
The difficulties, I am convinced, lie in my own lack of powers. It will probably repay multiple readings with closer attention, like a musician trying to master a complicated passage of music. It might even behoove me to try translating it for myself into words of one syllable. In the meantime, here is what the all-knowing Wikipedia has to say about it:
Barfield's book Poetic Diction begins with examples of "felt changes" arising in reading poetry, and discusses how these relate to general principles of poetic composition. But his greater agenda is "the study of meaning". Using poetic examples, he sets out to demonstrate how the imagination works with words and metaphors to create meaning. He shows how the imagination of the poet creates new meaning, and how this same process has been active, throughout human experience, to create and continuously expand language. For Barfield this is not just literary criticism: it is evidence bearing on the evolution of human consciousness. This, for many readers, is his real accomplishment: his unique presentation of "not merely a theory of poetic diction, but a theory of poetry, and not merely a theory of poetry, but a theory of knowledge". This theory was developed directly from a close study of the evolution of words and meaning, starting with the relation between the primitive mind's myth making capacity, and the formation of words. Barfield uses numerous examples to demonstrate that words originally had a unified "concrete and undivided" meaning, which we now distinguish as several distinct concepts. For example, he points out that the single Greek word pneuma (which can be variously translated as "breath", "spirit", or "wind") reflects the original unity of these concepts of air, spirit, wind, and breath, all included in one "holophrase". This Barfield considers to be not the application of a poetic analogy to natural phenomena, but the discernment of an actual phenomenal unity. Not only concepts, but the phenomena themselves, form a unity, the perception of which was possible to primitive consciousness and therefore reflected in language. This is the perspective Barfield believes to have been primordial in the evolution of consciousness, the perspective which was "fighting for its life", as he phrases it, in the philosophy of Plato, and which, in a regenerate and more sophisticated form, benefiting from the development of rational thought, needs to be recovered if consciousness is to continue to evolve.
For now, I shall have to take their word for it.
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