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Poetic Diction
London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928; 2nd Ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1952; reissued with an
introduction by Howard Nemerov, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964; 3rd ed.: Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan U P, 1973; 2nd Wesleyan ed. 1984; reissued by The Barfield Press, Oxford: 2010.
In the interview conducted during the making of Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning, Barfield recollects
how he came to write Poetic Diction. The product of a period in his life in his life in which his own
“intellectual scheme of things” was, like that of the times themselves, completely materialistic (in
philosophy and even in literary criticism, linguistic analysis and logical positivism reigned supreme), the
book had its beginnings in Barfield’s recognition that the reading of poetry brought about in him what he
would call a “felt change of consciousness.”
I began to find that I had very sharp experiences in reading poetry. Not so much of whole poems,
certainly not long poems. But particular phrases, particular lines, seemed to have some kind—one
uses the word magic, I can’t think of any other—but poetry was beginning to mean a lot to me, but
more from the point of view of particular moments then a considered critical appreciation of a
poem has a whole as a work of art. Especially metaphor, particularly metaphor. It seemed to say
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things to me that nothing else did. And it seemed to be something which was untouchable by the
over-riding materialism of my outlook. So I started to write about that.
After securing his degree at Oxford (in 1920), he began to work on what would become Poetic Diction as
a dissertation for a post-baccalaureate degree (received in 1927), eventually publishing it as a book in
1928.
Next to Saving the Appearances, a book written thirty years later which would revisit some of the
intellectual terrain first explored in Poetic Diction, this is probably Barfield’s most essential book. Though
very much a product of its time, Poetic Diction, Barfield’s only work of true literary criticism, remains
seventy years after its initial publication a still cited study of a literary concept, but it is much, much
more: “not merely a theory of poetic diction, but a theory of poetry; and not merely a theory of poetry,
but a theory of knowledge” (“Preface to the Second Edition” 14).
For the intellectual context in which Poetic Diction was written, see the chapter entitled “The Meaning of
Meaning and Poetic Diction” in Doris T. Myers’s C. S. Lewis in Context and T. A. Hipolito’s “Owen
Barfield’s Poetic Diction.” In “Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language,” Barfield recalls that Poetic
Diction was published at the worst possible moment for a book of that kind, just before the beginning of
the 1930s, which saw a quite violent reaction in literary circles against anything in the nature of
romanticism . . .” (Part 2, 14).
In Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning, Barfield humorously recalls his pursuit of the degree and
completion of his thesis:
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After graduating I stayed on a year at Oxford to get a B. Litt, bachelor of literature. And you had to
do a dissertation for that, and I suggested Poetic Diction. I had some difficulty because it wasn't the
kind of thing they expected of a scholar doing a dissertation. You were expected to write about
something, you know, “Was the third act of Hamlet really written by Shakespeare’s butler?” or
something like that. And I think that every graduate who is doing a B. Litt, has a supervisor. And I
think they finally decided that I better do without a supervisor, because my stuff being so odd
anyhow that they couldn’t fit one in. So I didn't have a supervisor, I just wrote on. And they gave me
the degree all right, anyhow.
“Apparently,” Barfield quips with characteristic humor, “The author was determined that the title at least
should be unassuming” (“Preface to the Second Edition” 4).
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