Owen Barfield influenced a diverse range of writers that includes T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien, W. H. Auden, Howard Nemerov, and Saul Bellow, and Owen Barfield's Poetry, Drama, and Fiction is the first book to comprehensively explore and assess the literary career of the "fourth Inkling," Owen Barfield. It examines his major poems, plays, and novels, with special attention both to his development over a seventy-year literary career and to the manifold ways in which his work responds with power, originality, and insight to modernist London, the nuclear age, and the dawning era of environmental crisis. With this volume, it is now possible to place into clear view the full career and achievement of Owen Barfield, who has been called the British Heidegger, the first and last Inkling, and the last Romantic.

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.

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 young academic is drawn towards activism when she is increasingly troubled by the growing threat of biocides. Through Virginia Brooke, Barfield charts the mental and spiritual journey of a thinking person - and, by extension, of all thinking persons - faced with "the need for action and the obligation to take it". From environmental thriller to Iron Age settlement, domestic estrangement and the alienation of Man from Nature, Barfield's last work of fiction will continue to delight admirers and provoke a fresh generation of thinkers. Owen Barfield is one of the twentieth century's most significant philosophers. He is widely known for his explorations of human consciousness, the history of language, the origins of poetic effect, and cross-disciplinary thought. A member of the Inklings, an Oxford group of scholars, Barfield's thinking informed the writings of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien, among others. Eager Spring is Barfield's 'eco-novella', written when the author was almost 90.

This Ever Diverse Pair was first published in 1950, when Barfield was practising as a solicitor in London. A humorous portrayal of everyday life in a lawyer's office, the novel's true subject is what C.S. Lewis described as "the rift in every life between the human person and his public persona - between, say, the man and the bus conductor or the man and the king..." Owen Barfield is one of the twentieth century's most significant writers and philosophers. Widely renowned for his insight and literary artistry, Barfield addresses key concerns of the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and arts in our time. His fellow Inklings, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, are among the leading figures influenced by Barfield's work. "A work of art and more original than anything I have read for a long time" - C.S. Lewis

'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."

'History, Guilt and Habit' is a collection of essays, based on lectures given by the author on the West Coast of North America. This brief, accessible book outlines Barfield's primary ideas: the distinction between the history of ideas and the evolution of human consciousness; the nature of morality, and the danger of mental passivity becoming habit. This new edition includes 'Evolution', Barfield's only essay on physical evolution and how it relates to the evolution of consciousness. "You can dig into the earth with a spade in order to get beneath the surface. The spade is itself a product of the earth, but that does not bother you. But if, by some mysterious dispensation, the spade were part of the very path of earth you were splitting up, you would be rather nonplussed, because you would destroy the instrument by using it. And that is the sort of difficulty you are up against when it is not the earth you are digging into, but consciousness; and when it is not a spade you are digging with, but language . . . However quickly you turn around, you can never see the back of your own head." (p. 13)

J. R. R. Tolkien is perhaps best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but it is in The Silmarillion that the true depth of Tolkien's Middle-earth can be understood. The Silmarillion was written before, during, and after Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. A collection of stories, it provides information alluded to in Tolkien's better known works and, in doing so, turns The Lord of the Rings into much more than a sequel to The Hobbit, making it instead a continuation of the mythology of Middle-earth. Verlyn Flieger's expanded and updated edition of Splintered Light, a classic study of Tolkien's fiction first published in 1983, examines The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings in light of Owen Barfield's linguistic theory of the fragmentation of meaning. Flieger demonstrates Tolkien's use of Barfield's concept throughout the fiction, showing how his central image of primary light splintered and refracted acts as a metaphor for the languages, peoples, and history of Middle-earth.

Owen Barfield is known primarily for his many publications on the evolution of consciousness and the essential reframing of cultural history that results from this theory. At the center of his philosophy is a deep analysis of mythology and poetics that draws from Coleridge, Steiner, and others to reveal the noetic role of the poetic principle and its salient shifts that map the evolution of conscious experience. A member of the Oxford Inklings group, Barfield’s first published book, The Silver Trumpet (1925), is the first märchen, or fantasy story, published by any of them. Despite the influence Barfield exerted on contemporary authors such as Howard Nemerov and Saul Bellow, the biggest gaps in the published corpus of the Philosopher of Poetry are most of the major poems and poetic dramas he wrote according to his theories that place poetics at the core of conscious experience itself. This current publication remedies this absence by presenting five striking literary pieces composed throughout Barfield’s lifetime. The Tower, an introspective narrative poem, is the ‘great work’ of Barfield’s youth; Medea, a mythopoeic drama, is seemingly his last major poetic and dramatic work. Between these two are the mythopoeic narrative poem Riders on Pegasus, a trilogy of Anthroposophical mystery plays Angels at Bay, and the light-hearted extended poem The Unicorn. Readers of Barfield’s philosophical works and Inklings enthusiasts will find much to admire and enjoy in this volume.