Definition as Achievement

Barfield responds to critics who charge that his attention to individual words “is a precious and dilettante kind of criticism.” He says “the reverse is the truth” and further argues that “Words whose meanings are relatively fixed and established, words which can be defined – words, that is, which are used with precisely the same connotation by different speakers – are results , they are things become . The arrangement and rearrangement of such univocal terms in a series of propositions is the function of logic, whose objection is elucidation and the elimination of error. The poetic has nothing to do with this. It can only manifest itself as fresh meaning ; it operates essentially within the individual term, which it creates and recreates by the magic of new combinations . . . . in the pure heat of poetic expression juxtaposition is far more important than either logic or grammar. Thus, the poet’s relation to terms is that of maker.”

All criticism is a kind of midwifery, and criticism that attends to words is attending to poetry at the moment of birth. Attending to words gives the critic a share in the moment of creation. Other forms of criticism focus on the achieved results of this process of birth. Barfield asks, “What kind of criticism, then, is dilettante: that which attempts to know, by sharing in, the poetic process itself, or the fastidious sort which can only moon aimlessly about the room with its hands in its pockets, till theinfant is nicely washed and dried and ready for inspection?”