FINISHED READING - Poetic Diction by Owen Barfield

'Great poetry is the progressive incarnation of life in consciousness.'

It appears to be part of Owen Barfield's destiny to be overshadowed by his two fellow Inklings Tolkien and CS Lewis. They were highly influenced by his spiritually inflected, philosophical ruminations on the origins of language, and went on to apply those ideas into literary form. Poetic Diction, then, came to my book pile with a lot of expectations hanging upon it. And it has lain there for quite some time, not through lack of interest, but bravery. 

Barfield's central premise, posits a different direction of travel for the development of human language. The traditional view is that gutteral sounds become rough hewn simple attributed words, born out of the first stumbling steps of our self consciousness. These over time accrue deeper and more embellished metaphorical meanings, and rise to a high point with the develop of poetry, through Greek Classics, to the Renaissance and the Romantics. What Barfield proposes is another trajectory. What first  emerges are certainly words, but what type of words were they? Themed compound words, with spiritual poetic metaphorical souls.. They arose, to use Barfield's term, as a given, fully formed and imbued with their own poetic diction and richness of meaning. Over time these all encompassing poetical meanings become broken down into their individual constituents. Separated, the words become denuded of their complex breadth. What he proposes is that the tone language took in this first words was existential, poetically lucid and mythic to its very bones. Whatever would follow this over the centuries, is becomes entirely allusively metaphorical in character.

' Spiritus in Latin meant originally blowing, or wind. But when the principle of life within man or animal had to be named, this outward sign, namely the breath of the mouth, was naturally chosen to express it. Hence in Sanskrit asu, breath and life, in Latin spiritus, breath and life. Again, when it was perceived that there was something else to be named, not the mere animal life, the same word was chosen, in the modern Latin dialects, to express the spiritual as opposed to the mere material or animal element in man. All this is metaphor.'

Original poeticism was an innate unconscious form, which through use of metaphor poets try to revive or invoke a reflected connection with. Words gradually shifted to  become fixed consistent and prosaic in usage. Until we get to the point where Barfield considered contemporary poetics as either mundane in the how and what of it's expression, or overly concerned with, what he refers to as the architecture, its construction rather than the centrality of meaning. 

To demonstrate this process in the chapter on The Making of Meaning 1, he takes the Latin verb Ruo, which can be translated as to rush, to fall or to collapse. This is a word that describes any process of disastrous movement, a declining flow, a deluge, a torrent. This can be psychological, allegorical, economic, and many other applications. The necessity was for three separate words for rush. fall and collapse to arise. Ruo becomes ruina, and what was once about the impermanent nature and character of the falling itself becomes about the thing that has fallen, the desolate state of ruin. Ruin becomes the conclusion rather the process of being ruined.

For me, these sort of examples were where Barfield's idea start to come alive and feel credible. I am less interested in the philosophical slant to his work. Mainly because though I strain my mind attempting to understand it, I do have to recognise the limitations of what I'm able to comprehend. If anyone were to ask me why Barfield became overlooked, I'd say the manner of his expression is probably key. It reads, to these contemporary ears at least, as encumbered. Overly cluttered with explicatory asides, which like the chattering of birds in the trees outside, distract or disrupt the flow of comprehension. 

I have noted previously, that when an author quotes another writer in a book, and that quotatiion encapsulates the ideas of the book you are reading much better, this is telling about the writers ability to communicate their own ideas. I worked hard, but frequently failed to keep up with what he was attempting to express. His use of phrases and poetry in the original Greek, Latin, French or German and not providing you with a translation, struck me as having an arrogant assumption at its core. He either didn't think this ought to be necessary, or that his readership really needed to be those better educated coves.

Qualms and quibbles aside, there are occasional delightful snippets of information. That the frequency with which a poet uses a word, may not always be down to a limitation of vocabulary. That the word itself has some personal quirk or resonance, that suggests it held a deeper meaning for them than just it's lexicography or etymology might reveal. Coleridge had a particular liking and use of the word quiet, Addison had a love for the word secret, Milton's appeared to be fond of the word trim, whilst Shakespeare used the word function in a wide variety of contexts and inferences. The latter may in part be that function was in his time still a new word, being first used fifty years before Shakespeare began to write. It's meaning still open to be explored and expanded in its range of uses. And that itself, is a part of the thrill of new words, new expressions freshening the meaning of older ones. In our rationalised standardised world, the role of poetry and the poet is to return what has become inflexible in meaning back to the fluidity of a stream, to present us with a freshly minted word or unexpected juxtaposition.

'Strangeness shall have an interior significance;it must be felt as rising from a different plane or mode of consciousness, and not merely as eccentricity of expression. It must be strangeness of meaning.'

There are further ruminations here about the uses and abuses of archaism and conservatism, the vulgar and colloquial in language. Also on what makes great poetry and great poets. All of which are the sort of questions an academic might ask, but which a poet would give little consideration to, because nothing inhibits the spirit of poetic adventure more than too close an awareness of the technical guardrails and goal of your work in progress.

' The natural progress of language, if left, as it were, to itself, 

is a progress from poetic towards prosaic.'

 
CARROT REVIEW - 4/8