Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning by Owen Barfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Storehouse of the Imagination

The central metaphor of Poetic Diction is language as the storehouse of human imagination. Remarkably this was voiced 25 years before Wittgenstein’s Investigations, which it summarises rather neatly; and without any knowledge of Heidegger’s contemporaneously emerging philosophy, which identifies language as the “house of being” for humanity. As Barfield admits, his little book “claims to present, not merely a theory of poetic diction, but a theory of poetry: and not merely a theory of poetry, but a theory of knowledge. It is as such… that it must be judged.” And is difficult to judge it as anything else than profoundly prescient. That it as relevant, important, and stimulating as it was almost a century ago is the best tribute there could possibly be to Barfield’s intellect.

The metaphor of the storehouse does exactly what poetic diction is supposed to do. It disorients whatever it was we thought about language (and for that matter about storehouses). We are accustomed to consider language as that which we read and hear. But Barfield puts language somewhere other than where it is seen or heard in use. Not in some Platonic abstraction existing in a galaxy far far away, but as a potential from which we continuously draw and which sustains us at every moment. What we know about the world, indeed what we can possibly know about the world, is contained somewhere in that storehouse, and only there. It is by exploring that storehouse that we are capable of “grasping the reality of nature” because it is there that we actually participate with reality, including the reality of each other.

In the preface to the second edition, Barfield makes his debt to the philosophy of Hume explicit: “The notion that knowledge consists of seeing what happens and getting used to it as distinct from consciously participating in what is was first worked out systematically by Hume.” Language in other words is tautologically not what is not-language. And what is not-language is what we refer to as reality. We act within reality but we participate in and through language. And it is in light of this recognition that Barfield makes one of his most provocative claims. “Only by imagination,” he says, “can the world be known… The difficulty lies in the fact that, outside poetry and the arts, that activity proceeds at an unconscious level.” It is through poetic diction that new relationships, connections, and inferences are made in the storehouse.

Consequently, “the study of poetry and of the poetic element in all meaningful language is a valuable exercise for other purposes than the practice or better enjoyment of poetry.” Science, as well as all other human inquiry proceeds poetically. Science works, when it does, precisely because it utilises the poetic principle. The alternative means the death of not just inquiry but something more fundamental. “Of all devices for dragooning the human spirit, the least clumsy is to procure its abortion in the womb of language,” Barfield says, echoing both Leibniz and modern Pragmatists. Attempts to control or direct the imagination are always disastrous. The function of language as storehouse is “… to mediate the transition from the unindividualized, dreaming spirit that carried the infancy of the world to the individualized human spirit, which has the future in its charge.” In other words, the storehouse is a legacy which makes the entire history of humanity available to each person.

There are both aesthetic and ethical implications of the storehouse metaphor. Aesthetically the feeling of pleasure and beauty derives not from a perception of some static pattern of relationships in the storehouse but the creation of a dynamic comparison between some established convention and an entirely unexpected new set of connections. Hence the aesthetic is always a fleeting moment. The novel becomes the established almost as soon as it is created. This is what leads to what might be called poetic ethics. Barfield notes that “the average word  is a dead metaphor.” Dead metaphors are established comparisons we take for granted. We take such words literally, as if they unambiguously signify something which is not a word and connect to other words in some fixed formula. This leads to a form of secular fundamentalism, an insistence on controlling meaning and thus imagination. As I read it, therefore, we have a duty to continuously rattle the conventions contained in the storehouse. Perhaps in a way this is our fundamental duty as human beings.


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