Available as a Google eBook for other eReaders and tablet devices. Click icon below...
Summary
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. Jeanne Clayton Hunter is Associate Professor at Nassau Community College, and Thomas Kranidas is Professor and Chair of the English Department at State University of New York, Stony Brook.
Table of Contents
Introduction Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas
Poetry
Day
Sonnet: Once, once, this evening, let me say: I love you!
Translation from Petrarch: Amor, ed io si pien di meraviglia
La Dame A Licorne
Sonnet: How shall I work that she may not forget
The Silent Piano (For E.B.)
Michaelmas
Bad Day
Song of the Bakerloo
The Song They Sing
Flirting
Girl in Tube
A Visit to Beatrice
Can Light Be Golden?
Pollaiuolo's Apollo and Daphne
Piero di Cosimo's The Death of Procris
Sonnet: I am much inclined towards a life of ease
The Angry Boffin
Sapphics
Emeritus (on not trying to publish verse)
Fifty-Three
Al Fresco (on Modern Poetry)
The Queen's Beast (1954)
Escape
You're Wrong!
Funeral Oration
Medusa
Song of Anger
Hagar and Ishmael
I. Hagar and Ishmael
II. The Spy
III. Ishmael
Gender
The Merman
Enlightenment
At a Promenade Concert
The Milkmaid and the Unicorn
Video Meliora
Sonnet: Where can we hope to swim in 1ove's bright wave?
"How dolefully you raked into a blaze"
Sonnet: When the too-muchness of this angry trade
The Song of Pity or The Compassionate Society
Speech by a Gadarene Cabinet Minister
Sonnet: You said, and not as one exaggerating
The Sonnet and Its Uses
Rust
In
Mr. Walker
The Coming of Whitsun
Risen
Washing of Feet
Sacrament
Gizeh
Beatitude
A Meditation
From Orpheus: A Verse Drama Act II (lines 89-259)
Closing lines from "Riders on Pegasus"
Prose
Short Stories
Dope
The Devastated Area
Mrs. Cadogan
Two Prophetic Nouvelles
The Rose on the Ash-Heap (from the novel in manuscript English People)