Owen Barfield: The Literary Critic as Griceian

by J. L. Speranza
--- for the Grice Club.

THIS WAS MEANT as commentary on Helm's apt reply to McPherson, this blog. Blogger disallowed my publication in that thread, hence here:

Larry Helm: you are right on spot when you mentioned that ambiguity was much better understood THEN. I once wrote a piece which I entitled, and circulated publicly elsewhere, "Seven Types of Griceian Ambiguity"! -- punning on that Sheffield-born master (with the pipe and beard): Empson.

My favourite pre-Griceian master of literary criticism -- a favour I share with zillions -- is Owen Barfield.

This below is a commentary on his "Poetic Diction: A study in meaning", from the wiki entry for Barfield.

I don't like The Waste Land much -- or rather, having seen that horrendous film, "Tom and Viv" I came to realise that most of it was written by that darling of society and pathetic figure in the end: Vivian Haigh-Wood. This again after the Barfield cite from the wiki.

-- Barfield's Poetic Diction opens with examples of "felt changes" arising in reading poetry, and discusses how these relate to general principles of poetic composition. But Barfield's greater agenda is "a study of meaning". Using poetic examples, he attempts to demonstrate how the imagination works with words and metaphors to create meaning. He shows how the imagination of the poet creates new meaning, and how this same process has been active, throughout human experience, to create and continuously expand language. For Barfield this is not just literary criticism: it is evidence for the evolution of human consciousness. This, for many readers, is his real accomplishment: his unique presentation of "not merely a theory of poetic diction, but a theory of poetry, and not merely a theory of poetry, but a theory of knowledge". This theory was developed directly from a close study of the evolution of words and meaning, starting with the relation between the primitive mind's myth making capacity, and the formation of words. Barfield uses numerous examples to demonstrate that words originally had a unified "concrete and undivided" meaning, which we now distinguish as several distinct concepts. For example, the single Greek word pneuma (which can be variously translated as "breath", "spirit", or "wind") reflects, Barfield argues, the primordial unity of these concepts of air, spirit, wind, and breath, all included in one "holophrase". This Barfield considers not the application of analogy to natural phenomena, but the discernment of its pre-existence. This is the perspective Barfield believes is original in the evolution of consciousness, which was "fighting for its life", as he phrases it, in the philosophy of Plato, and which, in a regenerate and more sophisticated form, benefiting from the development of rational thought, needs to be recovered if consciousness is to continue to evolve."

Re: Viv:

"Eliot was in Oxford for one year only, and was expected to return to Harvard to begin a career as an academic philosopher, an idea he railed against. He wanted to be a poet. He had already completed The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1911,[6] the poem that was to make his name when it was published in Chicago in 1915, and he saw remaining in England as a way to escape his parents' plans for him. When he was in his 60s, Eliot wrote that he was immature and timid at the time, and was probably in love with Emily Hale, a Bostonian he'd had a relationship with back in the U.S.; he wrote her 1,000 letters over the course of his life, letters that his estate has so far not allowed to be published.[6] What he really wanted from Vivienne, he said, was a flirtation. But a meeting with the American poet, Ezra Pound, had persuaded him that the pursuit of poetry was possible, and in Eliot's mind marrying Vivienne became part of that, in that it meant he could stay in England and avoid philosophy at Harvard.[18] "'I came to persuade myself that I was in love with her," he wrote, "simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England." ... The couple were married after three months, on June 26, 1915 at Hampstead Register Office in London, with Lucy Ely Thayer, Scofield's sister with whom Vivienne had become close, and Vivienne's aunt, Lillia C. Symes, as witnesses. Eliot signed himself as of "no occupation," and described his father as a brick manufacturer.[19] Neither of them told their parents.... Cyril Connolly, the writer, spread a story that Vivienne had seduced Eliot in a punt, and that he had felt obliged to marry her—the "awful daring of a moment's surrender/Which an age of prudence can never retract" that Eliot writes of in The Waste Land—though James Edwin Miller argues that it was unlikely either would have felt that sex had compromised Vivienne, because she had already had at least one affair.[20] In any event, Eliot told a friend, Conrad Aiken, that he wanted to marry and lose his virginity....
In 1938 Vivienne was committed to a Northumberland House mental asylum on the borders of Harringay in north London. On 22 January 1947, never visited by Eliot, Vivienne died at the age of 58. The cause of death was given as a heart attack, but it is thought more probable that she overdosed."