1st Edition
Owen Barfield’s Poetry, Drama, and Fiction Rider on Pegasus
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.
Introduction
Chapter 1: A Figured Zodiac—The Tower
Chapter 2: A Maze of Awakening—English People
Chapter 3: A Life of Sane Despair—Orpheus, Medea, and Angels at Bay
Chapter 4: Time Is, Time Was—The Unicorn and Riders on Pegasus
Chapter 5: And I in Me—Night Operation, Eager Spring, and The Year Participated
Biography
Jeffrey Hipolito is the author of Owen Barfield's Poetic Philosophy: Meaning and Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2024), and his work has appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Journal of the History of Ideas, European Romantic Review, Journal of Inklings Studies, VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center, and Renascence. He currently serves as the chairperson of the Owen Barfield Society.
“Jeffrey Hipolito has produced a meticulous analysis of the creative oeuvre of Owen Barfield, the man known as “the first and last Inkling.” While I was familiar with Barfield’s philosophy, I knew little about his extensive creative output; Hipolito has immersed himself in the literary traditions that shaped Barfield’s creative oeuvre, deftly contextualizing it for his audience.”
––Donna L. Potts, Professor and Chair, Department of English, Washington State University—author of Howard Nemerov and Objective Idealism: The Influence of Owen Barfield.
“In a style that is at once erudite, eloquent, insightful, and lucid, Owen Barfield’s Poetry, Drama, and Fiction: Rider on Pegasus provides the first comprehensive elucidation of Barfield’s literary and poetic works. Jeffrey Hipolito illustrates how the well-known themes and perspectives of Barfield’s philosophical, linguistic, and critical writings are also central to his imaginative works of fiction, drama, and poetry. Owen Barfield's Poetry, Drama, and Fiction: Rider on Pegasus is an indispensable source for future research on Barfield, which will have to take into account the magnitude and unity of Barfield’s oeuvre as a writer, poet, and philosopher. In short, Hipolito makes it clear that a complete understanding of Barfield the philosopher is only possible when complemented with an understanding of Barfield the poet (and vice versa).”
––Dr Luke Fischer, University of Sydney
