Owen Barfields Poetic Philosophy

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 Barfields early poetics in the context of the critical hurly-burly of modernist London of the 1920s, Owen Barfields Poetic Philosophy: Meaning and Imagination shows how Barfields subsequent development of a philosophy of history, metaphysics, and ethics culminates in his development of a poetic cosmology. Hipolito situates Barfields 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 Barfields 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 Barfields 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.