Poetic Diction Quotes

“Even today it remains a moot point among the critics whether the very first extant poet of our Western civilization has ever been surpassed for the grandeur and sublimity of his diction.”
― Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction. A Study in Meaning

“that [rational] principle alone cannot add one iota to knowledge. It can clear up obscurities, it can measure and enumerate with greater and ever greater precision, it can preserve us in the dignity and responsibility of our individual existences. But in no sense can it be said ... to expand consciousness. Only the poetic can do this: only poesy, pouring into language its creative intuitions, can preserve its living meaning and prevent it from crystalizing into a kind of algebra. (144)”
― Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning

“It [the rational principle] shuts off the human ego from the living meaning in the outer world, which it is for ever 'murdering to dissect', and encloses the same ego in the network of its own, now abstract, thoughts. And it is just in the course of that very shutting off that the ego itself stirs and awakes to conscious existence.

Yet, having awoken, it is as helpless as any other new-born thing without the life of the mother-Nature from which it sprang. Let the weaning be followed too soon by separation, and the wailing creature perishes of cold. Such a separation, a separation of consciousness from the real world, is today only too conspicuous alike in philosophy, science, literature, and normal experience. Isolated thus, suspended, as it were, in vacuo, and hermetically sealed from truth and life, not only the proper name, but the very ego itself, of which that is but the symbol, pines and dwindles away before our eyes to a thin nothing--a mere inductive abstraction from tabulated card-indexed behaviour, whose causes lie elsewhere. Nor is there any remedy for this state of affairs but that experience of truth, or identification of the self with the meaning of Life, which is both poetry and knowledge.”
― Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning