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

Tom Kranidas
C. S. Lewis and the Poetry of Owen Barfield

The friendship of Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis is one of the most celebrated in the field of modern letters. "Opposition is true friendship," Barfield wrote in subscript to his dedication to Lewis of Poetic Diction. And Lewis dedicated An Allegory of Love to "Owen Barfield, wisest and best of my unofficial teachers." The brilliantly bracing effect that the two men had on each other has been well described in several places.1 But the "true friendship" included too a finely sympathetic and yet frank discussion of original poetry by both men, and this subject has scarcely been touched. It is a large subject and one which must wait for full treatment upon the publication of more of Barfield's verse. Here, very briefly, I should like to suggest something of the potential riches in this area by discussing several poems by Barfield which relate to Lewis.

Owen Barfield has written poetry during most his life. His first publication was in fact a poem, "Air-Castles," published in Punch in 1917 when he was still in school; some forty more poems have since been published, mostly in small journals. Lewis fans will know the "Abecedarium Philosophicum," which the two friends co-authored. There remain approximately 200 unpublished poems ranging from brief, playful quatrains to the marvelous long narrative "The Mother of Pegasus." Lewis saw many, if not most, of these poems, and he expressed admiration for a number of them. For example, Lewis liked "The Tower," a very early work (1919-26) by Barfield, and he quotes it (slightly inaccurately) in Letters to Malcolm: "The dulllest of us knows how memory can transfigure; how often some momentary glimpse of beauty in boyhood is 'a whisper / Which memory will warehouse as a shout.'"

"The Tower" is still in a manuscript in Barfield's possession. The passage quoted in Letters to Malcolm comes from pages 18-19 of this long, philosophical, rather Prelude-like poem:

In his "Introduction" to Light on C. S. Lewis, Barfield cites the use of this quotation as proof that "there never was a man like him [Lewis] for remembering his friends' verse, whether published or unpublished." In the same piece, Barfield speaks of "a long narrative poem" in which "two of the characters loosely and archetypally represented for me 'my' two Lewises." The poem is "The Mother of Pegagus," the two characters Perseus and Bellerophon. The poem is still neglected, still in manuscript.

Accompanying a group of exuberantly playful love poems to a lady (c. 1941-1945) is the following poem to Lewis:

Envoi
(To the Author of The Allegory of Love)

Barfield continued to write poetry and Lewis saw a good deal of it. He became in fact Barfield's chief, sometimes almost his only, reader, as the following playful quatrain, which Barfield remember sending to Lewis, suggests

A year after Lewis' death, Barfield memorialized his friend in the following:

Moira

I have only touched on one aspect of that remarkable friendship between Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis. Their exchange on poetry and in poetry are witty, technically brilliant, and often profound. They deserve further attention.

Notes

1Among others: R. J. Reilly, Romantic Religion; the Green-Hooper biography; Lionel Adey, C. S. Lewis's "Great War" with Owen Barfield.
2All original materials cited here are from Owen Barfield's private papers. Published with the permission of Mr. Barfield. All rights reserved. The original typescript of "The Mother of Pegasus" is in The Wade Collection at Wheaton College.