Poetic Diction

This book by Owen Barfield* is one I've read before but I didn't do a very nice job at the post last time round so I promise to be a bit more helpful on this go. It's a theory of meaning, blending philology, linguistics, cultural history, the evolution of poetic form, psychology, philosophy &etc to sketch a broad & deep body of theory into how poetic diction, thereby poetry, thereby meaning, thereby knowledge - function. Its contents are, in brief, as follows:

• the original preface from the 1927 first edition & a second, much meatier, one from the 1951 second edition
• chapters proper:
1. defining "poetic diction" with a few examples
2. the aesthetic effects of poetry
3. metaphor
4. meaning & myth
5. language & poetry
6. the poet as individual
7. the making of meaning
8. verse & prose
9. archaism
10. strangeness
11. concluding remarks
• four appendices: on the aesthetics of nature; on the philosophical difficulties of establishing & using concrete definitions; on "accidental" metaphors; & on the unhelpfulness of the objective/subjective distinction
• an afterword from 1972 which is basically just acknowledging intellectual debts to various other thinkers

   I found this book even more insightful & revelatory than I did on first reading.*** It does for poetics what Wittgenstein's Tractatus did for logic; and since logic is by nature devoid of actual meaning, only being able to establish logical relations between propositions, it is a much more fruitful book in every way. Barfield was a thinker of immense depth, breadth, scope & sensitivity, & in my opinion he deserves to be far more widely known & read. If you're interested in the philosophy of meaning in a grounded & pragmatic way, this will be an exhilarating synthesis of ideas; if you're more interested in a theory of poetry that will help you in your own artistic understanding & endeavour, you will not be disappointed either - probably not directly inspired, but certainly better-equipped. Highly recommended little book.

* One of the Inklings - the casual but serious gang of Oxford literary professors who would go for pints** & chat about ideas & their work, which also included J.R.R. Tolkien & C.S. Lewis, both of whom were in part inspired by Barfield's profound thinking around language.

** In a pub called The Eagle & Child; it's still there, I've been, it's nice. Quiet & cozy. The dudes have a demure but noticeable little plaque in their memory.

*** To be fair I was in the run-up to a psychotic break at the time, which I didn't know, obviously, but it was significantly colouring my apprehension of everything I was experiencing, including reading. One quibble from my previous post from that time that I will repeat is that it's rather irritating that the myriad quotes in Latin, Greek & French are, with one exception, left untranslated, even in the footnotes, which makes sense for an academic philological text's intended audience but feels a tad obscurantist as a general reader.