In 1976 Owen Barfield commented that his books "are now certainly ten times better known on the other side of the Atlantic than on this," in his native England. Although he went on to note with characteristic modesty and self-deprecation that "In saying this I do not forget that ten times nought is nought – and ten times one is still only ten," the fact is that for much of the twentieth century, and especially in its last third, Barfield’s books have attracted considerable interest and respect in the United States and Canada.1 For not only does Barfield address topics which particularly engage many modern Americans, but he also focuses directly and profoundly on the core aspirations of the American spirit. G. B. Tennyson has observed that all of Barfield’s attentive readers find in his books "not so much our antiself as our better self."2 This is emphatically true for Americans because Barfield illumines both the individual reader’s own "better self" and the cultural ideals which are expressed in the American Dream.

Aside from students of Anthroposophy who read his anthroposophical essays and translations of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures, the first Americans to encounter Owen Barfield’s work were poets and teachers who cherished Poetic Diction (1928) "not only as a secret book, but nearly as a sacred one" long before its first American edition was published. In his Introduction to that edition the American poet Howard Nemerov warned that in the modern United States there is real danger that the imagination itself will become entirely "enthralled by the false realism of the reason, spellbound to the merely picturesque, imposed upon, Blake would have said, by the phantasy of the angel whose works are only Analytics, and so prevented, in spite of all its claims and manifestoes, from dreaming deeply or other than the common dream." For Nemerov, the great value of Poetic Diction is that it affords a way out of the "positivist or behaviorist or mechanist" mindset that clouds and cramps the modern American worldview, opens us to "the deeper question of the extent of the imagination’s role as creator of the visible and sensible world," and thus frees us to dream largely and truly.3 Poetic Diction remains one of Barfield’s best known books in America. Widely read on American college campuses for the past thirty-five years, it has remained continuously in print and of enlivening interest to all who concern themselves with what it really means to imagine.

The need to understand and practice true imagining is felt with special urgency by many Americans because they sense that this is the only way to live the American Dream. Leon Howard explains in Literature and the American Tradition that students of American culture have come "to see the past less as a stream of water which the historian could observe or control and more in terms of a shifting flow of lava, consisting of a hardening surface and of undercurrents of energies and unformed beliefs. . . . The history of America was to be found as much in these undercurrents of impulse and belief as in their recorded expression, their solid surface and visible symbols."4 Carl Stegmann concurs, and adds that these impelling but unformed beliefs work especially strongly both in America’s creative artists and in her young people, for the "experience of life’s senselessness and meaninglessness is one that more and more Americans have, especially while they are young. Today many of them experience the meaninglessness, spiritual poverty, and monotony of contemporary civilization with its ambitions for the high life and greater wealth. They sense that something is astir in their souls, something completely different, that would like to break through."5 Owen Barfield seems to be speaking directly for these yearning Americans when he remarks, in an article for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, that "a strengthening of the faculty of imagination–-or better say the activity of the imagination–-is the only way in which we can really begin to have to do with spirit. I think I would put it this way: we live in that abrupt gap between matter and spirit; we exist by virtue of it as autonomous, self-conscious individual spirits, as free beings. Often, in addition, it makes us feel lamentably isolated." And in an image that evokes one of the grandest features of the American landscape, Barfield bracingly advises

Now imagination does not disregard the gap; it depends on it. It lives in it as our very self-consciousness does, in this case not as a small helpless creature caught in a trap between the two, but rather as a rainbow bridge spanning the two precipices and linking them harmoniously together . . . . It seems better to realize the gap and live in it not as a creature caught in a trap, but as the rainbow that spans it. Then, within the rainbow, or spectrum, of imagination we shall find ourselves free to move sometimes in one direction and sometimes in the other, either towards the one extremity-–let us say the red one-–of matter and perception, or towards the violet extremity of pure spirit. We shall be free to turn either outward towards what we perceive or inward towards what we are.6

The image of the rainbow also figures prominently in Saving the Appearances (1957, first published in America in 1965), which Americans discovered at about the same time that Poetic Diction came into widespread circulation in the United States and Canada.7 Barfield has vividly described the ensuing enthusiasm:

Perhaps it is because the books are not specially aimed at the younger generation that it seems to be rather specially the younger generation to which they appeal most effectively. . . . Saving the Appearances was, or so I was told, on sale in a Hippy bookshop in San Francisco soon after the American paperback appeared. In the universities it tends to be the young who introduce them to their teachers rather than the other way round. I can give you two examples. A few years ago the Subject received a letter from a Professor in a well-known Canadian University, introducing himself as a reader, who told him that this habit in the young was sometimes disconcerting to their teachers. The students would start throwing Barfield at them-–and they had never heard of Barfield! It was such a nuisance, he said, that in more than one university the younger members of the Faculty were coaching the older ones in what they called "Barfield-readiness." Again: at the height of the Student Protest period, when some of the students were insisting on running the whole show themselves (including setting the curriculum), at Berkeley in California they instituted a credit course in Barfield. It lasted for one term.8

As Barfield indicates, North American college students have remarkable energy and openness to new approaches. A large number of them are pioneers, first in their families to pursue higher education; increasingly, they are also nontraditional students, re-entering college after raising their children or working for many years. Many of them are first- or second-generation immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The American Dream stirs in them in all four of its principal aspects or dimensions: land, work, community and individuality.

For centuries America has attracted immigrants who envision an Edenically pristine and fertile "new golden land." The American landscape does in fact retain an impressively primeval vitality. F. W. Zeylmans van Emmichoven has pointed out that in America "nature faces man as a power, a creative force, that forms and transforms his entire being, and even influences his physical structure."9 Zeylmans also cites the noted American historian Henry Steele Commager on "the sense of spaciousness, the invitation to mobility, the atmosphere of independence, the encouragement to enterprise and to optimism" that the American landscape nurtures.10 For Native Americans, it especially fostered gratitude and wonder: "Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery."11 Saving the Appearances, which was published just at the time when college students began actively seeking ways to help modern America "touch the earth" in this Native American spirit, speaks pertinently to their cultural and environmental concerns: it distinguishes between "original participation," as exemplified by the Native American consciousness, and a "final participation" toward which the rainbow bridge of imagination enables us to progress as free individuals.12 Interestingly, one of Barfield’s last books is an ecological tale, the as yet unpublished novella Eager Spring. 

Owen Barfield’s own life was profoundly altered by his American readers and particularly by college students and their professors. No sooner had he retired from his thirty-year career as solicitor in the London firm of Barfield and Barfield than an utterly different career opened for him as visiting professor and lecturer at numerous universities in the United States and Canada. As he told the makers of the award-winning documentary film Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning (1995), "I really began a new life altogether when I went to America." Barfield’s second career took him to the East, Midwest and West regions of North America and spanned twenty-one years, from 1964, when he was visiting professor at Drew University in New Jersey, to 1985, when he made a last personal visit to academic friends in Los Angeles, California. He often expressed thanks for "the warm atmosphere of hospitality and personal welcome with which the faculty and students of an American university are wont to surround a visiting professor from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure."13 But he was even more grateful for the opportunity his American readers had unexpectedly and wonderfully afforded him: to practice what since childhood he had felt to be his true vocation, writer and philosopher of the Logos. To his great astonishment he found himself living the American Dream of following one’s inner calling.14

Simultaneously, Barfield’s books and lectures were helping many Americans find and follow their own vocations. I am one of those Americans. In 1966 a fellow graduate student lent me his copy of Barfield’s Worlds Apart (1963). This book taught me how to be a scholar and professor. A model of interdisciplinary inquiry, it has showed me exactly how to avoid being caught up in the modern academic tendency toward fragmented and compartmentalized thinking. Moreover, Worlds Apart, which is subtitled A Dialogue of the Sixties, consists of an extended imaginary conversation among several specialists who earnestly desire to transcend their conceptual "worlds apart" and reach a meaningful meeting of minds; for this reason it has been my indispensable teaching manual in how best to encourage genuinely cooperative and collaborative learning among my college students. And I am far from alone in relying on Barfield. For the past twenty five years another member of my university’s faculty has applied his reading of Barfield to shape and sustain a liberal studies major that has long been admired as one of the finest interdisciplinary programs in the nation. And the recent presentations at both the East coast and the West coast celebrations of Barfield’s centenary made it clear that throughout North America Barfield’s readers continue to rely on his books for guidance in community building. Carl Stegmann eloquently states the importance of this effort: "In America, integration of all the representatives of humanity in one nation demands the search for the spirit of humanity which can unite them all. . . . There is no country on earth today where the necessity of attaining a common spirit transcending all narrow, nationalistic trends is as evident as in America."15

The search for the spiritual itself, and for how the spiritual might be realized in human community as well as in individual experience, is also part of the American Dream. Many Americans who are engaged in this search have discovered Owen Barfield because of their interest in the Inklings, a circle of English writers and thinkers to which Barfield belonged. According to G. B. Tennyson, a leading scholar on both the Inklings and Barfield,

What made the Inklings so special was not only the literary luster of its most visible members like [C. S.] Lewis and [J. R. R.] Tolkien, but that the group as a whole and despite its individual differences stood apart from, and indeed in opposition to, the nihilistic philosophy that has dominated so much of twentieth-century thought in western culture. Although C. S. Lewis is rightly regarded as the heart and soul of the Inklings as a conscious gathering, the true begetter of the original shift in outlook away from the dominant materialism of the age was Owen Barfield. He it was who in the early twenties embraced the holistic philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, which includes as a central dimension a belief in Christianity. It was Barfield’s shift as much as any single external force that led Lewis away from materialism and eventually to Christianity and a career as a defender of the faith without equal in this century.16

Barfield describes his own "shift" in his essay on "Philology and the Incarnation":

[I]t is possible – I know because it happened in my own case – for a man to have been brought up in the belief, and to have taken it for granted, that the account given in the Gospels of the birth and the resurrection of Christ is a noble fairy story with no more claim to historical accuracy than any other myth; and it is possible for such a man, after studying in depth the history of the growth of language, to look again at the New Testament and the literature and tradition that has grown up around it, and to accept (if you like, to be obliged to accept) the record as a historical fact, not because of the authority of the Church nor by any process of ratiocination such as C. S. Lewis has recorded in his own case, but rather because it fitted so inevitably with the other facts as he had already found them. Rather, because he felt, in the utmost humility, that if he had never heard of it through the Scriptures, he would have been obliged to try his best to invent something like it as a hypothesis to save the appearances.17

Having come to his own inner religious awakening by virtue of sustained vigorous thinking, Barfield could speak and write with impressive authority that "it is in the very nature of words that they use the material to name the immaterial, or if you prefer it, the phenomenal to name the noumenal – and indeed the nouminous."18 Out of his own earned understanding he also spoke and wrote lucidly "of the experience which one spirit may have of another spirit directly as spirit – therefore of a very close and intimate experience indeed," of how we can communicate with the dead, and of how we can "distinguish between subjective spirit and objective spirit, or between spiritual experience that is merely subjective and that which is also objective, or between that which is merely ourselves and that which is another being in ourselves."19 Appropriately, a special session of America’s scholarly Conference on Christianity and Literature was dedicated to Barfield’s work in 1982. 

Owen Barfield’s awareness of the nouminous is especially evident in his imaginative writings, where he demonstrates himself to be one of the "real poets" he writes about in his unpublished poem "Expression", for whom "The Not-self their imagination meets/ Is what comes singing through/ The world-stuff from outside." But for Barfield writing poetry was above all a means of awakening to one’s own authentic individual Selfhood. In his essay on "Style" he remarks that Albert Steffen

once wrote an article. . . . in which he pointed out that the solution of problems of style is really a way of initiation. Both may be conceived as a progressive disengagement of the not-self from the self. Initiation is not the acquisition of something new; it is the progressive revelation of something already there. By purging and purifying away the stains and irrelevancies which obscure it, the ego is laid bare, the true Self is found. And at the same time the discovery is made that the true Self is, from the earthly point of view, selfless.20

Modern Americans take a keen interest in the evolution of individual consciousness. Developmental psychology is widely accepted by Americans as true because it accords with what is for them an obvious fact: that human being is not so much a noun as it is a verb, a dynamic activity. Moreover, Americans have a compelling "belief in the creative power of the human spirit to endure and prevail and to exist in the meanest and queerest of individuals."21 Indeed, the heart of the American Dream is the impulse to free the individual spirit to evolve and create. Many of Barfield’s American readers feel that this is the area in which Barfield is most helpful to them. In the words of one of Owen Barfield’s most prominent American admirers, Saul Bellow,

We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free. Free from what? From the prison we have made for ourselves by our ways of knowing, our limited and false habits of thought, our "common sense." These, he convincingly argues, have produced a "world of outsides with no insides to them," a brittle surface world, an object world in which we ourselves are merely objects. . . . A clear and powerful thinker, and a subtle one, Mr. Barfield is not an optimist, but he does believe that we can get out of the prison--or the madhouse. Once you have recognized, appalled, that you are indeed behind bars you will passionately desire to get out. Difficult, yes, very difficult, but feasible nevertheless.22

Perhaps most of all in his lectures to American audiences, Barfield does indeed issue a stirring call "to begin scraping a tunnel beneath [the] walls" of the collective mental habits or tabus that imprison modern consciousness. He sounds startlingly like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau when he encourages us to keep in mind that "a collective habit can be broken down into a large number of individual ones – and it is only an individual who can begin to break them." And he is very American when he urges us to take hold of the freeing "force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures," for "Imagination is really thinking with a bit of will in it."23

Notes

¹ Barfield made these comments in "Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language", a lecture he gave at Rudolf Steiner House in London, England. First published in the American journal To-Wards (in 1978), this lecture was later reprinted as a booklet by another American firm, St. George Publications. See page 17 of that booklet for the particular remarks cited in this paragraph. See also page xxiv of the American scholar G. B. Tennyson’s Introduction to A Barfield Reader: Selections from the Writings of Owen Barfield (Wesleyan University Press, 1999): "Barfield often said that he had no British public, but that may be putting it too strongly. He certainly has had British admirers. In addition to the Inklings and dedicated Anthroposophists, who might be thought to be partial, Barfield early enjoyed the esteem of T. S. Eliot, who accepted his fiction for the Criterion, and subsequently that of Walter de la Mare, Cyril Connolly, and William Empson, among others, and of W. H. Auden, who wrote an appreciative introduction to a reissue of History in English Words. In recent years more and more British scholars have been citing Barfield’s work; the numbers seem likely to grow." 
² G. B. Tennyson, "Foreword" to Barfield’s History, Guilt, and Habit (1979), page xx. 
³ For all of the quotations in this paragraph, see Poetic Diction (1964 edition), pages 1-9.
⁴ Leon Howard, Literature and the American Tradition (1960), page 8.
⁵ First published in 1991 as Das Andere Amerika, Carl Stegmann’s The Other America was published in English in 1997. This passage appears on page 29 of The Other America.
⁶ This essay, "Matter, Imagination, and Spirit" was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 1974 and reprinted in Owen Barfield’s book The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays in 1977. The passages quoted here appear on pages 149-150 of The Rediscovery of Meaning.
⁷ The rainbow is the subject of Saving the Appearances’ opening chapter. One indication of how effectively Barfield’s treatment of the rainbow has communicated to his American readers is that the title of the new electronic journal dedicated to scholarship on Barfield is The Rainbow. See the Owen Barfield site on the world wide web.
⁸ "Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language," page 18.
⁹ Zeylmans traveled extensively in the United States during each of his three visits to this country and recorded his discoveries in Amerika und der Amerikanismus (1954), published in English as America and Americanism (1986). This passage appears on page 15 of America and Americanism. 
¹⁰America and Americanism, page 12.
¹¹ Chief Luther Standing Bear of the Oglala Sioux, quoted on page 45 of Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence, compiled by T. C. McLuhan (1971).
¹² An American professor has written an outstandingly thoughtful and substantive article on Barfield’s contribution to this important topic. "The Other Missing Link: Owen Barfield and the Scientific Imagination," by Howard Fulweiler, was published in the scholarly journal Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 46.1 (1993), pages 39-55.
¹³ Owen Barfield, Speaker’s Meaning (1967), page 9.
¹⁴ Several books by Barfield were published during this richly productive period in his life. Speaker’s Meaning (1965) and History, Guilt, and Habit (1979) are composed of lectures he gave at universities in the United States and Canada; The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays (1977) includes numerous lectures and articles that he wrote for American audiences; and What Coleridge Thought (1971) is a full-length, in-depth study which grew out of Barfield’s work as professor and lecturer. In addition, Barfield’s American students and colleagues edited three volumes of Barfield’s writings, Orpheus (1983), Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (1989), and A Barfield Sampler (1993), and published a Festschrift in his honor (Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity, ed. Shirley Sugerman, 1976).
¹⁵ The Other America, page 32.
¹⁶ G. B. Tennyson, "Wisest and Best: Owen Barfield, the Last Inkling," in California Political Review (January/February 1998), pages 37-38.
¹⁷ First published in 1965 in The Gordon Review (now known as the Christian Scholar’s Review), "Philology and the Incarnation" was reprinted in The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays. See page 236 for the passage quoted here. 
¹⁸ Barfield made this remark in "Language, Evolution of Consciousness, and the Recovery of Human Meaning," a lecture which he gave in a 1980 symposium in Woodstock, Vermont on "Knowledge, Education, and Human Values: Toward the Recovery of Human Values." The lecture was published in the Spring 1981 issue of Teachers College Record, where the statement quoted here appears on page 433.
¹⁹ See "Matter, Imagination and Spirit" in The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays, especially pages 152-153.
²⁰ Owen Barfield, "Style," Anthroposophical Movement 10 (8 June 1933), pages 83-86.
²¹ The words are Leon Howard’s in Literature and the American Tradition, page 329.
²² On the dust jacket of Owen Barfield’s book History, Guilt, and Habit (1979).
²³ See History, Guilt, and Habit, page 80.