Poetic Diction

Owen Barfield

That the idea of Poetry and Science as two fundamentally opposite modes of experiencing Life should have taken firm hold of a generation which honours Aristotle, Bacon and Goethe, will, I believe, be as much a matter of wonder to our posterity as it will--if not re-adjusted--be a matter of tragedy to ourselves.

Oscar Wilde's mot--that men are made by books rather than books by men--was certainly not pure nonsense; there is a very real sense, humiliating as it may seem, in which what we generally venture to call our feelings are really Shakespeare's 'meaning'.

Barfield's project in Poetic Diction, more a proposal, an outline, than exhaustive research, points to what will be one of the most fundamental crisis of the Internet Age. How many generations have absorbed scientific speech as a more precise, less figurative mode of speech than poetic? The Science-Poetry duality is second-nature to most of the Western World at this point, so that at its best Poetry is a way of discussing the things that are too wishy-washy for Science (thus far that is, Science fully expects to reduce the amount of wishy-washiness and with time fully eliminate the need for Poetry) and at its worst is cheap emotional off-gassing.

In most of Western culture, Poetry is allowed by Science to have some credibility in the realm of the unconscious but this is only because Science has not grown into its own quite yet. The necessity, even the meaning, even the worth of Poetry will vanish with each Scientific measurement. It is against this lunacy that Barfield raises his sword.

Barfield proposes that science cannot exist without poetics, indeed that scientific thought cannot be fully understood except through poetics. Based in the concept that scientific discourse cannot take place except in the forum of words*, Barfield launches into wordy warfare. Tracing words back to their first union with meaning, Poetic Diction argues that it is Poetry that has given words their meaning.

In 1928, at the time of Poetic Diction's publication, there were several schools as to how words originally gained meaning: one school was that words were once entirely literal. When a man used the word for tree he meant most completely specifically that tree over there next to the rock that looks like a dog picking its nose. Essentially this school argued that at one point all words were proper names. At some point then comes along an age of such poetic greatness that words are divorced from their specific name meanings and the concept of abstraction is born. The tool for this great divorce, they claimed, was metaphor.

The second school said claimed that all meaning had its root in metaphor. That words originally could not be anything other than metaphor. Since the vocabulary of early languages was so limited, metaphor was forced to be applied to almost all speech.

Barfield contends that neither of these approaches is correct. Instead he says that the trend of speech is to become more and more abstract, which is to say precise, and that in the early stages of language, concepts and physical identities were not so distinct. To Barfield, a myth is a thing that embodies both metaphor and proper name and so Barfield believes that language once rolled and mixed these two together so entirely that neither was neither. The development of language has been the process of separating the two.

I have not done justice to Barfield's complex argument about a complex subject. Read the book if you'd like an unscathed understanding.

*As a note, I find it incredibly interesting that with electricity we have now converted words back into numbers...binary code and the like. This of course makes the system incredibly more complex. I'm sure that Kurt Godel has something to do with this at some point, but mostly the concept of mathematics as a language is interesting to me. Because with coding languages we now have a link from numbers to words and a language which can be converted into numbers and understood that way as well as understood as words. It wouldn't do to convert Crime and Punishment into binary code and show it to people. Not at all. But some people can read simple programming in its numerical state...