Owen Barfield’s Poetry, Drama, and Fiction

Book excerpt: 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.