A Golden Anniversary:
Owen Barfield in America by Jane Hipolito A little more than half a century ago, the Saturday Evening Post published “The Rediscovery of Meaning,” an essay by the English anthroposophist Owen Barfield which it had commissioned for its “Adventures of the Mind” series. Barfield was a surprising choice for the series, as unlike most of the other contributors, who were internationally famous artists and thinkers, his work was known only to a very few at the time. This situation changed dramatically in the early 1960s. Barfield’s Saturday Evening Post essay was swiftly followed by numerous other mainstream publications and by lectures, interviews, conference appearances, and visiting professorships at several universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. To this day, Owen Barfield’s life and work continue to enkindle interest worldwide, and particularly in North America. Two of the most striking aspects of Barfield’s biography are its scope and variety. Owen Barfield’s life encompassed almost all of the twentieth century. When he crossed the threshold in December 1997, he was in his 100th year. Born in November 1898, during the reign of Queen Victoria, he came of age during the First World War and as an adult experienced the tremendous social and cultural changes which came about in the ensuing eight decades – among them, the emancipation of women, the birth of the environmental movement, and the development of numerous innovations that we now take for granted, including the airplane, electronic media, and computer technology. During these same eight decades Barfield had three quite different careers. The first of these was as an independent “man of letters.” He began this career while he was a student at Oxford University, where he earned a “First” in the then new subject area of English language and literature and a Master’s and a B.Litt. degree (equiva32 •
being human
lent to a Ph.D.) in the same field. During that time and for some years thereafter, he wrote prolifically, publishing lyric poems, short stories, essays and reviews on literature, language, economics, key aspects of contemporary culture, and anthroposophy, to which he was introduced in 1923. He also published three books: The Silver Trumpet (1925), a magical and very witty fairytale for children of all ages; History in English Words (1926), which lovingly explores how the evolution of consciousness can be “read” in the changing meanings of English words; and Poetic Diction (1928), a lucid, insightful study of how poetry expresses meaning. Of these three, Poetic Diction has had the deepest and most lasting effect. As the American poet Howard Nemerov appreciatively wrote in his introduction to Poetic Diction’s 1964 edition. Mr. Barfield and his book have been very little heard of in the United States during all this while [since Poetic Diction’s first publication in 1928]. But I should add that among the few poets and teachers of my acquaintance who do know Poetic Diction it has been valued not only as a secret book, but nearly as a sacred one; with a certain sense that its teaching was quite properly esoteric, not as the possession of a few snobs but as something that would easily fail of being understood by even the most learned of those jugheads whose mouths continually pour forth but whose ears will serve only for carrying purposes. Barfield’s second career was as an attorney with a busy London practice. He entered the legal profession in 1931 because he needed to support his family and found that the prevailing cultural and economic situation made it impossible for him to do that as an author. During his years in the family law firm, Barfield and Barfield, he published much less voluminously than he had in the 1920s, but his writings attained new depth. Among them were the essay “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction” (1947), the verse drama Orpheus, which premiered in 1948, and the autobiographical novel This Ever Diverse Pair (1950), as well as the many essays and poems which Barfield wrote for anthroposophical journals; some of those essays were anthologized in Romanticism Comes of Age (1944, second ed. 1966). In addition to the “very few poets and teachers” in North America who knew and cherished Poetic Diction, the principal audience for Barfield’s work throughout the 1930s and 1940s was the anthroposophical community in Great Britain and, to a lesser extent, students of anthroposophy elsewhere in the English-speaking world and in Europe. This was not a large readership, but it was a staunchly loyal and encouraging one, as Barfield grate-