In this book Michael Di Fuccia examines the theological import of Owen Barfield's poetic philosophy. He argues that philosophies of immanence fail to account for creativity, as is evident in the false shuttling between modernity's active construal and postmodernity's passive construal of subjectivity. In both extremes subjectivity actually dissolves, divesting one of any creative integrity. Di Fuccia shows how in Barfield's scheme the creative subject appears instead to inhabit a middle or medial realm, which upholds one's creative integrity. It is in this way that Barfield's poetic philosophy gestures toward a theological vision of poiēsis proper, wherein creativity is envisaged as neither purely passive nor purely active, but middle. Creativity, thus, is not immanent but mediated, a participation in being's primordial poiēsis.

A representative selection from the major writings of the man C. S. Lewis called “the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers.”

'Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis' is a collection of essays and lectures about the author, theologian, and literary scholar, C. S. Lewis. Barfield and Lewis were close friends for 44 years, from their Oxford days after WWI to Lewis's death in 1963. Barfield's reflections on their relationship ended only with his own passing, in his hundredth year. Barfield was instrumental in converting Lewis to theism. However, the two disagreed on many points, and it is that creative dialectic which defines and irradiates their friendship: "In an argument we always, both of us, were arguing for the truth, not for victory" (Owen Barfield). C.S. Lewis on Owen Barfield: "The wisest and best of my unofficial teachers." "Barfield towers above us all." To Walter Field: "You notice when Owen and I are talking metaphysics which you don't follow: you don't notice the times when you and Owen are talking economics which I can't follow. Owen is the only one who is never out of his depth."

"The playful artistry of the Waldorf Alphabet Book speaks to the heart of childhood. These lively illustrations, so filled with color, movement, eloquent gesture, and invention conjure up long-forgotten memories of books from a time when pictures were still alive and spoke with power. Each page is a magical door, opening to the bright realm where stories are enacted, a realm of wonders accessible to children, artists, and ll those in whom the light of imagination shines. "The most important thing as you peruse the delightful pages of the Waldorf Alphabet Book with your child is the engaging conversation that flows between you as you search among the pictures for words." (from the afterword) In this delightful, bestselling alphabet and game book for young children, each consonant and vowel comes to life in vivid pictures that show each letter's unique qualities in the world. The vibrant and playful illustrations help children learn the alphabet in the most natural and living way. This expanded paperback edition includes a complete essay by master Waldorf teacher William Ward, "Learning to Read and Write in Waldorf Schools": This is the alphabet book for parents and teachers who want to encourage the most natural development in children. It is ideal for both at home and in the classroom. It also makes an ideal gift for your favorite young child or parents!

'What Coleridge Thought' presents Coleridge's ideas in a coherent form, carefully organized to demonstrate precisely what his thoughts were and how his writings develop them. Coleridge's objective was to stimulate his readers into thinking for themselves - "to excite the germinal power that craves no knowledge but what it can take up into itself" (S. T. Coleridge). Barfield guides the reader towards this. Here will be found the heart of Coleridge's thinking.

C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J.R.R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met every week in Lewis's Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion, and ideas; read aloud from works in progress; took philosophical rambles in woods and fields; gave one another companionship and criticism; and, in the process, rewrote the cultural history of modern times. In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings' lives and works. The result is an extraordinary account of the ideas, affections and vexations that drove the group's most significant members. C. S. Lewis accepts Jesus Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, maps the medieval and Renaissance mind, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. J.R.R. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into gripping story in The Lord of the Rings, while conducting groundbreaking Old English scholarship and elucidating, for family and friends, the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. Owen Barfield, a philosopher for whom language is the key to all mysteries, becomes Lewis's favorite sparring partner, and, for a time, Saul Bellow's chosen guru. And Charles Williams, poet, author of "supernatural shockers," and strange acolyte of romantic love, turns his everyday life into a mystical pageant. Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized reality, wartime writers who believed in hope, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century's darkest years-and did so in dazzling style.

This is a collection of the fiction and poetry of one of the twentieth century’s most influential and significant thinkers. Barfield is known widely for his explorations of human consciousness, the history of language, the origins of poetic effect, and the interaction of the disciplines, especially literature and the hard sciences. This book presents Barfield as a writer of imaginative literature. In the stories, one finds both post-war displacement and Bloomsburian ironies. In the two short novels, Barfield gives us two stunning versions of the Apocalypse. In his poetry he explores the varieties of human experience, often in radical relation to the past. A seemingly conventional poetic introduces explosive theological and sexual issues, confrontations with urban despair and fragmentation. Barfield’s creative work is original, daring, and prophetic. His voice heralds a new age of consciousness of which our time is becoming increasingly aware.

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.

'The Rediscovery of Meaning' is a collection of essays about language, imagination, the human being, society and God. In each, Barfield points to solutions to the modern-day experience of meaningless fragmentation. This book includes some of Barfield's most brilliant, most readable, and most profound pieces. Among them are 'Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction', 'The Harp and the Camera', 'Matter, Imagination and Spirit', and 'Philology and the Incarnation'.