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In their Oxford days, both Barfield and C.
S. Lewis hoped their literary futures would be as poets. Barfield's
third book, Poetic Diction
(1928) was, of course, a bi-product of
his early passion for poetry. Though these dreams of youth were never fulfilled,
both continued to write poetry, and the recently published A
Barfield Sampler has made Barfield's verse generally available
for the first time, and the nature of the poetic, both narrowly and broadly
defined,1
has remained central to all of Barfield's thought, of vital importance
to his understanding of the evolution
of consciousness.
For Barfield "great poetry" may be defined
as "the progressive incarnation of life in consciousness" (PD 181).
Over the perpetual evolution of human
consciousness, which is stamping itself upon the transformation of language,
the spirit of poetry hovers, for ever unable to alight. It is only when
we are lifted above that transformation,
so that we behold it as present movement, that our startled souls feel
the little pat and the throbbing feathery warmth, which tell us that she
has perched. It is only when we have risen from beholding the creature
into beholding creation that our mortality catches for a moment the music
of the turning spheres. (PD 181)
This concise definition and highly poetic description
of poetry appear on Poetic Diction's
final page, the product
of a book-length dialectical investigation into poetry's meaning.
Poetic
Diction, and his other writings as well, offer numerous postulates
about poetry which lay the groundwork for Barfield's conclusion.
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[Poetry is always] something more than the signs
or sounds by which it is conveyed. (41)
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[Poetry] exists primarily in the world of consciousness.
(41)
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The question of whether or no I can call a given
group of words "poetry" is, in fact, immediately dependent on my own inner
experiences. (42)
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[It is possible for a group of words to] be unpoetic
to the consciousness which originates it, but poetic to the consciousness
which receives or contemplates it. (49)
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Although the poetic principle in language has
waned since Homer's day, poetry as inner experience has increased. The
light of conscious poetry which can irradiate a modern imagination, as
it comes into contact with, say, the Homeric hexameters, is not to be compared
with such fitful aesthetic gleams as must indeed have flared up now and
again amidst the host of grosser pleasures preoccupying the dim-self consciousness
of his own (probably half-intoxicated) audience. (105-106)
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In general in the language of poetry the perceptual
element is proportionally higher than in prose; while in prose the intellectual
element predominates over the perceptual. (HGH 23)
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I cannot find any more profundity in the proposition
that "a poem must
not mean but be" than I could in the proposition, say, that "a satellite
must not orbit, but stop still." (RM 132)2
On the long-standing controversy concerning the
"progress of poetry"--the debate on the origin and historical development
of poetry--Barfield has much to say. "All literatures," he observes,
are, in their infancy, metrical, that
is to say based on a more or less regularly recurring rhythm. Thus, unless
we wish to indulge all sorts of fanciful and highly "logomorphic"
notions, we are obliged to assume that the earliest verse-rhythms were
"given" by Nature in the same way as the earliest "meaning." And this is
comprehensible enough. Nature herself is perpetually rhythmic. Just as
the myths still live on a ghostly life as fables after they have died as
real meaning, so the old rhythmic human consciousness of Nature (it should
rather be called a participation than a consciousness) lives on as the
tradition of metrical form. We can only understand the origin of metre
as going back to the age when men were conscious, not merely in their own
heads, but in the beating of their hearts and the pulsing of their blood--when
thinking was not merely of Nature, but was Nature herself. (PD 146-47)
The situation of the modern poet, working by imagination
rather than inspiration, is, of course,
entirely different.
The modern poet is in some sense .
. . in the position of having to fight against words, whereas the primitive
bard was carried forward on their meanings like Arion on the Dolphin's
back. Where then does the modern poet find again the poetic principle that
is dying out of language? Where? Nowhere but in himself. The same creative
activity, once operative in meaning without man's knowledge or control,
and only recognized long afterwards, when he awoke to contemplate, as it
were, what he had written in his sleep, this is now to be found within
his own consciousness, and it calls him to become the true creator, the
maker of meaning itself. (PD 107)
See in particular
Poetic
Diction, passim, "Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction" (RM
44-64). |
1"When I speak
of the poetic," Barfield reminds in Poetic Diction, "I mean what
many people would prefer to call the 'creative'" (105). |
2Barfield has
in mind Archibald MacLeish's famous dictum in his poem "Ars
Poetica." |
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