Books by Owen Barfield

“This book by Barfield, This Ever Diverse Pair, frequently mentions Blake. In fact, in the denouement of the book, one of the characters is offered a kind of prescription that involves reading William Blake. So it’s always intrigued me quite what Barfield saw in Blake. Apart from these references, I wasn’t clear on what Barfield loved about Blake until recently, when another Barfield scholar sent me an as-yet-unpublished paper by Barfield, explicitly on Blake and what Barfield felt in Blake’s work—a bringing back of an older consciousness into the present.” Read more...

The best books on William Blake

Mark Vernon, Biographer

“He’s partly an etymological scholar, but he also has a very sympathetic imagination. He explores the ways in which the histories of particular words can reveal changes in the ways that humans experience the world. Flowing all the way through the book is a very grand vision of the evolution of consciousness. It’s not a long book but in some ways it’s quite daunting because it’s so erudite. It would now, I’m sure, be dismissed for not having scholarly rigour but it actually does have that, as well as a very idiosyncratic approach. He looks at particular words—electric, garden and quality, say. He looks at how the meanings of those words have changed and what that says about the past.” Read more...

The best books on Language

Henry Hitchings, Linguist