Here’s another excerpt from Owen Barfield‘s Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. I’m quoting it in partial answer to a comment posted by Joel Jacobson in reply to my just previous post, asking what I meant by “technological rationalism,” which I had claimed was one of two powerful fundamentalisms at work in America today, the other being “religious unreason”. I replied to Joel in the comment stream, but not very clearly, and I’m hoping that Barfield can provide a context for what I was driving at:
Now although, without the rational principle, neither truth nor knowledge could ever have been, but only Life itself, yet that principle alone cannot add on iota to knowledge. It can clear up obscurities, it can measure and enumerate with greater and ever greater precision, it can preserve us in the dignity and responsibility of our individual existences. But in no sense can it be said to expand consciousness. Only the poetic can do this: only poesy, pouring into language its creative intuitions, can preserve its living meaning and prevent it from crystalizing into a kind of algebra. ‘If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character,’ wrote William Blake, ‘the philosophic and experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round.’ Like some others of the mystics, he had grasped without much difficulty the essential nature of meaning. For all meaning flows from the creative principle […] whether it lives on, as given and remembered, or is re-introduced by the individualized creative faculty, the analogy-perceiving, metaphor-making imagination. In Platonic terms we should say that the rational principle can increase understanding, and it can increase true opinion, but it can never increase knowledge.
Actually, I’m not sure that will help, because one really needs to have read the entire book to receive the full impact of Barfield’s insight.
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
I did rather read Lawrence Ferlinguetti or Gregory Corso.<br /><br />Until then…<br /><br />antigonum cajan
well. I. call. "It".<BR/>by it’s ‘real’ name:<BR/><BR/>numerical relativity<BR/><BR/>well just about 7:03 a. m. here<BR/>time for another pot of coffee ‘straight-up'<BR/><BR/>then, maybe, <BR/>I can<BR/>clear up <BR/>some obscurities <BR/><BR/>between sips?
Maybe with another cup of coffee it would read "was he was a was he." I do like Lewis…some of his stuff is way over my head though. I just flipped through an essay the other day in a collection title <I>The Christian Imagination</I> that deals with this idea of creativity and creation of art. I’d like to write about it, but I’m not quite sure I have my head around it yet…but maybe that’s why
Re the above comment: "was he was a"?? I need another cup of coffee….
You’d like Barfield, I think. Although not a Christian in the ordinary sense (he was a follower of Rudolf Steiner, whose anthroposophical movement deeply influenced his thinking), Barfield was he was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, and the respectful debates they had all their lives allowed both of them to become subtler thinkers. Anyway, Wiman seems to be thinking along Barfield’s lines. In fact,
I’ve got to read this book! Hmmm, maybe I need it as a capstone reference! I still need to process the quote you provide, but it reminded me of an <A HREF="http://www.theamericanscholar.org/gazing-into-the-abyss/" REL="nofollow">interview</A> with Christian Wiman (editor of Poetry) in the American Scholar. He’s discussing his faith, but mentions the idea of the reality of something being made