Owen Barfield’s Poetic Philosophy: Meaning and Imagination

The first book to offer an overview, at once introductory and comprehensive, of the philosophical thought of Owen Barfield, sometimes known as the ＂first and last Inkling＂ and as the ＂British Heidegger.＂

Beginning by placing Barfield’s early poetics in the context of the critical hurly-burly of modernist London of the 1920s, Owen Barfield’s Poetic Philosophy: Meaning and Imagination shows how Barfield’s subsequent development of a philosophy of history, metaphysics, and ethics culminates in his development of a poetic cosmology. Hipolito situates Barfield’s poetic philosophy in relation to his significant contemporaries (and predecessors) including T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, I.A. Richards, Jean Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, bringing to light for the first time many important aspects of Barfield’s thought. The book concludes with an analysis of the Burgeon trilogy, in which Barfield recapitulates the themes and arguments of his poetic philosophy by exemplifying them in three genre-defying works of fiction.

Structured chronologically and giving a systematic examination of Barfield’s thought, Owen Barfield’s Poetic Philosophy paints a much-needed picture of a major thinker and poet, who was entirely engaged with his times and who remains crucially relevant to our own.

Jeffrey Hipolito is an independent scholar living in Seattle, USA. He has published articles and essays in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, European Romantic Review, Journal of the History of Ideas, Renascence, Journal of Inklings Studies, and VII, and is the current chairperson of the Owen Barfield Society.