Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Barfield Owen
Title : Poetic diction
Year : 1928

Link download : Barfield_Owen_-_Poetic_diction.zip

Foreword. This book first appeared in England in 1928, and was reissued there in 1952 with the addition of a new preface (here included) that helped to specify the application of its author's argument to views of the subject that had in the interval become more explicit, more brutal, and more unthinkingly accepted by scholar and layman alike, than had previously appeared possible. Among the few poets and teachers of my acquaintance who know POETIC DICTION it has been valued not only as a secret book, but nearly as a sacred one; with a certain sense that its teaching was quite properly esoteric, not as the possession of a few snobs but as something that would easily fail of being understood by even the most learned of those jugheads whose mouths continually pour forth but whose ears will serve only for carrying purposes. It is not for the prefator to anticipate the arguments of the book, which the reader perhaps should already be learning at first hand by abandoning me in favor of Mr. Barfield; maybe the only preface worth having would be one such as I saw in a manual of Buddhism: that said, in effect, if you have read this far, throw the book away, it's not for you. But it may be appropriate to introduce the American edition of Owen Barfield's book with some reflections on its subject, and on the situation of that subject at the present time. ...