FAQ Group: Life and thought

Discovering the etymology of words is fun but it doesn’t quite capture the full, revelatory impact of the imagination that Barfield sought. So next he turned to poetry and another book, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928). It’s had a lasting impact. His focused shifted. He no longer drew on etymology but on literary… Continue reading Why is poetry so important in his thesis?

History in English Words (1926) was Barfield’s first book length attempt to articulate his ideas about words, and to see how far his intuition about their active nature could really take him. In the book, he treats them like fossils. Much as the petrified remains of skeletons and shells tell biologists about the evolution of… Continue reading What did he mean that words are “fossils of consciousness”?

Barfield began to work out why his newfound spiritual perception was not fanciful and located the reason in language. Words have meaning, he said, stating the obvious. No-one can deny that. And they have meaning because they are not like the algebraic signs of abstract logic: x, y, α, β. Rather, they share in what… Continue reading So Barfield began to think that words have soul?

Owen Barfield was born in 1898, twenty days before C.S. Lewis, during the last years of the Victorian era. He died in 1997, a few months after Tony Blair became British Prime Minister. Educated at Oxford, a solicitor for most of his working life, he lived in London and Sussex. He wrote novellas, poems, plays,… Continue reading Who was the last Inkling, Owen Barfield?