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36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Perennial and Profound, January 12, 2003
By his own admission, Owen Barfield's writings can't be organized into "early" and "late" periods. He claimed that from the very first publications to the last, he was explicitly or implicitly working out his understanding of the evolution of human consciousness. His second published book, _Poetic Diction_, concerns the study of language as the record of the changing human experience of the world.In _Poetic Diction_, Barfield argued that:
1. One defining effect of poetry is to "arouse aesthetic imagination"
2. A significant result of the interaction with the language of the poem is that the reader's awareness of the world is permanently expanded
3. The expansion of the reader's awareness correlates to the poet's own awareness of the world as articulated in the poem Barfield supposed, further, that what may be prosaic to the author may still have a "poetic" effect on the reader, i.e., expanding the reader's awareness of the world. One consequence of these facts, Barfield argued, is that by reading, the reader perceives the world as the author perceives - or perceived - it. And if the text being read is a classical Latin text, or a Sanskrit text, for example, then the reader may experience very startling glimpses of the world as a result. What he went on to argue was that, if we grant that this effect of poetic diction on our awareness of the world is a real effect, then we cannot escape the conclusion that the world as the authors of the Latin and Sanskrit texts was a very different world than our own. Further, he argued that one could trace those differences in the changes that languages have undergone since human languages have been recorded. Finally, by studying these changes, said Barfield, one sees that human consciousness in its first expressions in language was almost wholly perceptual and figurative. Barfield then argued that the "poetic effect" of such ancient texts was that they make available to the reader an experience of the world that correlates to their concrete and figurative language, and that world is one that couldn't have been produced analytically and self-consciously - for instance, by superstition or some early attempts at scientific theorizing. Just as our language today expresses in myriad ways what we take to be real, so the ancient languages too. Thus Barfield's conclusions about *poetry* are nothing at all like what contemporary academic literary theory concludes, because Barfield's conclusions are equivalent to a theory of knowledge - while contemporary literary theory denies implicitly that a theory of knowledge is even possible. As literary theory, then, _Poetic Diction_ is only marginally relevant, if even that, because literary theorists no longer concern themselves with knowledge. As a theory of knowledge, and as a study of the significance of language and the evolution of human consciousness, _Poetic Diction_ remains a seminal work, the challenges of which have yet to be realized in but a few works even today.
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