Review of Jeffrey Hipolito’s Owen Barfield’s Poetic Philosophy; Meaning and Imagination

By Fred Dennehy

Owen Barfield was the leading spokesperson for anthroposophy in England for most of the twentieth century. He lived from 1898 to 1997, and was actively writing for at least seventy of those years. He had been known to the general public until recently principally as a highly accomplished if somewhat unorthodox member of the ‘Inklings,’ a loosely constituted assembly of writers associated with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein. Today, though, he is beginning to be recognized by a new audience of readers as a thinker of startling and foundational originality.

At the age of 85, Barfield wryly noted that “[t]here is an earlier Wittgenstein and a later Wittgenstein; there is an earlier Heidegger and a later Heidegger; an earlier D.H. Lawrence and a later D.H. Lawrence; but there is no earlier Barfield and later Barfield. He always says the same old thing.” He added that, “I have the feeling, when I write a book, that I always write the same book over and over again, though perhaps in a different context or from a different approach.”

How do you do scholarly justice to a man who, by his own admission, over the course of nearly three quarters of a century, didn’t say anything new? In Owen Barfield’s Poetic Philosophy , Jeffrey Hipolito solves the question in a masterful way. He makes clear that Barfield’s central insight - the thing in him that never changed - is not a theory, but a profound imagination, the full realization of which lies not on the plane of knowing but of being. Barfield is resistant to presentation through the ordinary lattices of literary or philosophical history. And so, Hipolito chooses not to deconstruct Barfield’s philosophy, but to unfold it in a series of widening contexts.

He begins with Barfield’s seminal insight into language, particularly the meaning of metaphor, which he had arrived at by the early 1920s, even before his acquaintance with the works of Rudolf Steiner. For Barfield, metaphor is not just a stitching together of resemblances, but the recovery of universal meaning through inspiration and reason working together in a fierce polar tension. The meaning is one in which the reader participates , so it is not just a new thought we come to know, but a new way of being we experience And this is not just a discrete aesthetic moment. Poetic language has the capacity to react in a more permanent way on a reader’s ordinary experience of the outer world, so that it begins to betray significances that were previously unknown.

Such a view of poetics was radically different from what any of the other literati were saying in the twentieth century. Hipolito shows this convincingly by placing

Barfield in the context of better known critics like T.S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, and C.S. Lewis, and, later, Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. Barfield was a Romantic for whom the question, “In what way is imagination true?” was absolutely critical. The answer he found opened the way to the recognition of a spiritual actuality that simply was not permitted in the polite circles of critical discourse.

Mr. Hipolito then turns to Barfield’s understanding of history as an evolution of consciousness , which he shows to be the core of his poetic insight displayed over the larger canvas of Western history. Barfield has been wrongly classed by some along with the purveyors of large narratives of ideas, such as Spengler and Toynbee. But the evolution of consciousness is something far more elemental. The very magnitude of what Barfield was saying has been slow to clarify for the scholarly world and it is this: Since consciousness is correlative to the phenomena (the appearances) of the world, the evolution of consciousness is not a mere transition of ideologies, but an evolution of reality itself.

He then confronts the overarching theme of polarity – if anything, more fundamental to Barfield than the evolution of consciousness. The universe, for Barfield as well as for the Romantic poet and thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge, invariably reveals itself as the activity of two opposing forces: I and the world, subject and object, noun and verb, nature and man, universal and individual, inspiration and imagination, and countless other polar contraries. The opposition cannot be resolved by choosing between them or somehow fusing them; they have to remain in tension, where they point always to an ‘antecedent unity’ that can only be grasped imaginatively. Polarity is a paradox in terms of abstract thought, but a mystery as it begins to be experienced. As a lens through which to see the world, it yields extraordinary insights, but more important, it shows the way beyond informational and analytical knowing to the cognitive experience of being.

Mr. Hipolito has a long background in anthroposophy, and so he is able to follow Barfield where many of his other expounders have to stop. He shows how Barfield’s central insight into the nature of language was both confirmed and expanded in the sweeping cosmology of spiritual science. And he demonstrates convincingly how anthroposophy may be seen as “Romanticism come of age.”

The remainder of the book takes us from the rarified precincts of polarity and spiritual cosmology to the rhythms of lived experience. Mr. Hipolito shows how Barfield’s approach to the most persistent questions of ethics - how we live and love - is fully continuous with the other elements of his philosophy, as well as with Rudolf Steiner’s practice of ‘moral intuition.’

The final chapter is the most adventurous. We are transported into the twisting ordeals of transformation undergone by Barfield’s own fictional representative, the lawyer and philologist G.A.L. Burgeon. In three works of fiction, This Ever Diverse Pair, Worlds Apart , and Unancestral Voice , Burgeon makes his way from a harrowing personal breakdown, through a cognitive cleansing in a tour de force Platonic symposium, to an extended Pauline initiation. In the process, Mr. Hipolito showcases Barfield’s immense talents as a literary artist, an area that he has explored in greater depth in the companion volume to this, Owen Barfield’s Poetry, Drama and Fiction: Rider on Pegasus. 