Thoreau, Dickinson, and Barfield and the World as Window of Opportunity (2002)

Emily Dickinson and H. D. Thoreau are very much alike. While they quarrel with limitations of Renaissance, they consolidate its achievements, (1) and do so in very much same language. Owen Barfield also knows enough move forward to new plane that includes, rather than replaces, old. (2) Thoreau has this move in mind when he says that old [should] be expanded with new, universal, and more liberal laws. (3) Thoreau, Dickinson, and Barfield are so much alike, because they are all grounded in what William W. Quinn has called the only tradition (4) and, before him, what Joseph Campbell called monomyth. (5) In Thoreau country a particular mountain ... has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one (6) In particular, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Barfield would convince us visually that profiles we are not objects but images and, therefore, that world is more window rather than prison wall. (7) Windows imply eyes, and Emerson too uses nature to look through nature. At our highest moments, he says, we become a transparent (8) and poet, therefore, does not write poems from fancy, at safe distance from his experience, (9) but takes very close look at things. Dickinson knew well what means to take risk and put her eye Upon Window Pane -- (327) of experience. (10) Thoreau cuts more than one whole through the culmination of idolatry in nineteenth century (11) with sharp visual images. Punning also on see and meter, he puts Emerson's well-known dictum to work, for it is not metres, but argument, that makes poem, (12) and accordingly Thoreau would stand right fronting and face to face with fact.... as if were cimeter [scimitar], and feel its sweet edge. His see-meter can the sun glimmer on both its surfaces. (13) Emerson, Dickinson, and Thoreau all know that thought and form are equal in order of time, but in order of genesis thought, is prior to (14) Readers of Barfield's Saving The Appearances will recognize Emerson's metre as an earlier name for alpha-thinking which turns fountain of life into system of laws. (15) But Barfield goes Emerson one better: his thought not only precedes but also shapes form. And with such laws we arrive at William Blake's bete noire, Sir Isaac's metrical universe of opaque bodies moving through gravity-free, frictionless vacuum. (16) Such metre-making arguments make Dickinson's poetry difficult and Thoreau's prose challenging. Dickinson in particular is hard read, because she is read empirically even though she is not saying empirical things. Barfield suffers same fate. But once you catch on to this epistemological blunder (cf. poem #1684), Dickinson's apparently bizarre metaphors, odd punctuation, and garbled syntax, not to mention Thoreau's equally bizarre paradoxes and Barfield steely arguments, become soul of transcendental clarity. Indeed, all of them are so clear, and consistent, that if relishing factitious complexity did not put bread on table, many critics would find such clarity boring and themselves with nothing to say (and on lookout for more useful masterpieces). A transcendental eye-ball is BEM enough to boggle any empiricist. The world may be collection of objects, but under such gaze these are neither opaque nor arbitrary. In Emerson's nature objects, being used as type, possess a second wonderful value, because there is no fact of nature which does not carry whole sense of nature.... poet turns world to glass.... (17) And it is not words only that are emblematic; is things which are emblematic.... Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories.... A fact is end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is terminus or circumference of invisible world. (18) The poet's job is to put his eye to lens of world and focus upon its reality, because `Faith' is fine invention . …