IX. Imagination and Seeing through Naming

T. S. Eliot submitted his dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley, to the philosophy faculty at Harvard in 1916, but he never returned to complete the remainder of the requirements for his degree.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For that thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it.

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

size=2 color=black face=Cambria>With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion.³

Bradley influenced Eliot’s poetry and the style of his prose. His idealism was unique. In some forms of idealism, a network creates an object by knowing it (Berkeley), or the act of knowing an object transforms it in a way that creates an unbridgeable chasm between the knower and the thing-in-itself (Kant), or the knower and the known belong to a whole that is an all-inclusive actualization of Geist (Hegel). Bradley rejected these. In his form of idealism, the subject and the object come into existence at the same time within an event. His technical term for this event was experience. Within experience, understood in Bradley’s peculiar sense, there is no distinction between subject and object. This wholeness was central to his idealism. Against the backdrop of Bradley’s idealism, Eliot set out to investigate whether or not the self can know anything outside itself. The short answer is Yes. But what we can actually know falls short of what we wish to know.

Eliot grappled with the possibility of experiencing the world as a unity, beyond the incremental approach of the fact gatherer and the discursive laborer. Much of his life and art was an attempt to achieve this wholeness. But all around him, and within himself, the world fell into unconnected pieces.

Bradley’s idealism illuminates Eliot’s conclusions (and perhaps his poetry as well). It avoids the mistake of identifying Eliot as a solipsist; he was not, and he argued vigorously against solipsism. Bradley called his central concept experience, but he used the word in several unique ways. We must understand his (and Eliot’s) uses of the word to understand the realities he was naming. There are three kinds of experience. Immediate experience precedes any distinction between the knower and the known, between subject and the object. In immediate experience, knowledge and its object are one. It is a direct experience of knowing and feeling, but it cannot be called mine because this kind of experience is prior to any category called my self. Immediate experience does not belong to a self. It is identified with what Bradley, and Eliot following him, called finite centers. This is a term that is difficult to define, and Eliot’s own attempt is a bit enigmatic: “The finite center, so far as I can pretend to understand it, is immediate experience.”⁴ It is the unified whole, prior to the distinction of self from non-self, the whole that will, alas, break up into relational consciousness. But before this dissolving, it just is immediate experience, the only thing that can be called reality. It is close to Vico’s idea of the gigante and their imaginative universals. Understanding the idea of a finite center depends upon understanding what immediate experience is.

Immediate experience is the root of the desire to overcome dualism—Kantian or otherwise.

How do we find our way back to unified reality if our intelligence is responsible for breaking up immediate experience in the first place? We learned to cure cancer with intelligence. We went to the moon with intelligence. We established civilizations with intelligence. And yet, intellect is the source of disharmony and unreality. Is there any way back to wholeness for intelligent creatures such as us?

There is reason for hope, but achieving the way is difficult for someone rich in intellect—it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. If there is a way, it is found in the third kind of experience that Bradley and Eliot call transcendent experience. After immediate experience falls apart, the discursive intellect does the work of cataloging fragments and divisions. It then draws lines between the dots in a laborious effort to recover some approximation of wholeness by identifying relationships among discrete things. But the discursive intellect can never achieve unity.

Donne, I suppose, was such another

Who found no substitute for sense,

To seize and clutch and penetrate;

Expert beyond experience …⁶

Discursive intellect lives in a kind of experiential purgatory, always approximating but never reaching the completed end. Transcendent experience converts the discursive intellect, giving it a new purpose and end. The wholeness that was simply present in immediate experience is achieved in transcendent experience as the intellect is made to serve the aim of wholeness by learning to feel thought. Thinking dissolves immediate experience into objects and relations that are unreal. Thinking by itself filters reality, turning it into abstractions that are unreal and bound only by the strings of relations that always fall short of unity. Because of this, thinking always keeps us from reality. We try to get closer. We aim at reality. We pretend to build theories from starting points grounded in experience. We begin with truths to which most people give their assent, and then we try to find novel connections among these truths.⁷ But even with all this labor, it is unclear whether or not we can ever achieve transcendent experience.

The object of felt thought is immediate experience, which is always present in the background. We can learn to feel it there. Our hope for achieving wholeness depends on learning to feel this background and then making it an object of thought without refracting it into parts. Because this activity is not itself immediate experience, we will still experience objects in the world as distinct from ourselves and ourselves as distinct from objects. Transcendent experience seems to require that we live among dichotomies, while holding the dichotomous nature of the world in abeyance. We must accept the constructed nature of objects. Naming is constitutive of this middle world, the purgatory of the intellect somewhere between immediate experience and transcendent experience. Through naming and the development of language, we develop not only our ideas but our experience of reality as well.

Genesis 2:19 is a story about naming: “Out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.”⁸ Eliot echoes this in own account of naming: “Try to think of what anything would be if you refrained from naming it all together, and it will dissolve into sensations which are not objects; and it will not be that particular object which it is, until you have found the right name for it.”⁹ Apart from the act of naming, we would experience only unbundled sensation, not objects. For an object to be an object, rather than an unstrung series of perceptions, it must retain identity in difference over time. Particular perceptions occur in time, moment by moment. Each moment is unrelated to other moments. The perception, the content of one moment, is related to the content of another moment via the object that endures.

We do not grasp an object through moment-bound particular perceptions. We grasp an object through its name. Without words, no objects.¹⁰ As Wallace Stevens’s jar in Tennessee “made the slovenly wilderness surround that hill,” our name for an object is the logical and meaning-filled force that organizes our sensations, turning the world of feeling into a world populated by a self and an object. Between immediate and transcendent experience, the world forms only through objects and relations among those objects. Within this world the reality of an object depends upon both the boundary established by naming and the relations the object has to other things in the world. This leads Eliot to conclude that reality is a convention.

If we want to know what an object is, we must know its name. If we want to know whether an object is real or imaginary, we must know its relations. The distinction between the real and the imaginary is not absolute. Far from it. The distinction is always relative to the conventions that constitute our individual experience of reality. Degrees of reality vary depending upon the number and kind of relations that exist. One agonizing variation occurs when an object of desire is possible, and therefore could be real, but is nonetheless imaginary: anyone who has fallen in love but been rejected by the beloved will understand this. In the middle world between immediate and transcendent experience, there is no single convention to which reality conforms. Epistemology makes an error when it assumes that the world is a single, complete, consistent reality. The world is full of contradiction and mutually exclusive perspectives, all of which are equally real.

Our true end, in the sense of purpose, is to achieve transcendent experience. It is unclear whether or not we can achieve transcendent experience, but feeling and the life of the mind depend on trying. Because we ate from the tree of knowledge, we live in a fallen world as exiles from the garden. Stevens reconciled himself to this exile through his idea of the Supreme Fiction, but his work had a kind of melancholy since he accepted the Supreme Fiction as fiction. Eliot could not bear this, though he agreed that the philosophy and poetry we make are fictions, insofar as they are never complete. They are never complete in part because we cannot achieve reality and in part because we cannot accept that we cannot achieve reality. When philosophy is doing its work well, it resists our tendency to make premature conclusions about the truth of the world. It is iconoclastic, preventing our pragmatic constructs from becoming idols that interrupt our pursuit of deeper truth. It embraces the practice of questioning our metaphysics so that our metaphysics stays open to new aspects of reality. Eliot concluded his dissertation by writing, “This emphasis upon practice—upon the relativity and the instrumentality of knowledge—is what compels us toward the Absolute.”¹¹ Later in his life he came to believe that we can never reach the Absolute unless the Absolute reaches toward us. He did not want a Supreme Fiction. He wanted a True Myth. And the only True Myth that sufficed for Eliot was Christianity, the story not of humanity reaching the Absolute but of God reaching us.

The philosophical life begins in imagination, it reaches past the stories about the world that are handed to us as children, and it proceeds in light of who we are—fallible creatures who hunger for reality but whose lives are short. Our imaginative journey into reality does not have to go far before we realize that our grasp of truth is never certain, and we have little time to explore and to commit. Given these conditions, we need a few basic starting points upon which to build to flourish. Every account must start somewhere. Wherever we start building our theories, we must always ask, “Is this the reality of my world of appearance?”¹² Our acceptance of any metaphysics requires a kind of goodwill. We must assume that truth is one and that reality is one, even if our theory gets it wrong. Metaphysics is a form of play. When we do metaphysics, we pretend our theory is true. But it is only by playing that we feel the contours of reality emerge.

When Eliot converted to Christianity, he found a more satisfying account of what first drew him to Bradley’s idealism and the possibility of transcendent experience. The adventure is worthy of a life. Through poetic, philosophical, religious, or scientific acts, we try to glimpse the light, testing the veracity of our discoveries by feeling and thought. But the worlds of Bradley’s Absolute and that of Eliot’s later Christianity are very different worlds, with very different accounts of thought, feeling, and the act of naming. The kind of universe we live in matters. It determines the meaning of our central imaginative act—naming what shows up in the world. In the myth of creation, where the universe is full of meaning, poetry is the naming of things, a naming that is witnessed and delighted in by the creator.

Though poetry is the act of naming what shows up in the world, it sometimes uses words that are strange to us, or words that are familiar but put to strange uses that awaken our minds. Names remind us of strangeness in a world to which we have grown dull. Strangeness can be overwhelming. Eliot saw this in Coleridge, who was haunted after he was visited by the muse: “He was condemned to know that the little poetry he had written was worth more than all he could do with the rest of his life.”¹³ The poems of haunted poets leave us wondering whether the haunting is present in the world or only in the poet. Does the poem reveal the haunting or project it? Telescopes are made things, but the mountains we see on the moon are actually there, and we could not see them without the telescope. When a poet names the strangeness of something in the process of creating a poem, our own ability to see can grow as we participate in the poetry. We learn to see the strangeness as more than mere unexpectedness, oddness, or curiosity. It arises from the sense that there is something behind, within, beneath, and above the universe as it shows up for us.

The power of the imagination is transformed within a metaphysics open to wholeness, the Absolute, or God. It becomes a way in. It becomes a way in simply because there is an in to hope for and to pursue through our poems, stories, music, sculptures, and paintings. When the imagination is baptized in this way, the act of contemplation has both a new partner and new tasks. It has a new partner because the poetic imagination and the philosophical imagination bind themselves to each other. By doing so, both kinds of imagination grow in new ways. It has new tasks because if the poets are saying more than they know, the philosophers have adventures ahead of them they could never have otherwise imagined. That is the best we can do. In the last couple of pages of his book Eliot wrote, “So long as our descriptions and explanations can vary so greatly and yet make so little practical difference, how can we say that our theories have that intended identical reference which is the objective criterion for truth and error? And on the other hand our theories make all the difference in the world, because the truth has to be my truth before it can be true at all.”¹⁴ But to this we might respond by returning to George MacDonald: “To every person I say, ‘Do the truth you know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know’.”

In a recent issue of a popular magazine, a prominent cognitive scientist, Donald D. Hoffman, argued that the world we perceive is nothing like reality.¹⁵ Science aims to disclose the nature of reality by disentangling observations from observers. But there are a couple of problems. First, how can a lump of flesh between our ears, obeying the basic laws of the universe, lead to reliable self-conscious experience? Neuroscientists call this the really hard problem. Second, quantum physicists have repeatedly shown that we get our answers wrong if we assume the particles have an observer-independent existence. The physicist John Wheeler has suggested that even though in ordinary circumstances it is useful to say that the world exists out there, independent of us, such a theory can no longer be upheld in science. These two problems taken together create a dilemma: neuroscientists struggle to understand how first-person reality is even possible, while quantum physicists grapple with how science can reach anything but a first-person reality.

Hoffman argued that an organism possessing vision tuned only for fitness will always have a survival advantage over an organism that sees reality as it is. He used computer interfaces to illustrate the idea. We see icons on our screens because they have color, position, and shape, which are the categories we used to navigate the world. But the file on the computer responsible for the icon is nothing like the icon. Likewise, we have been shaped to experience a world that is itself nothing like the complex reality underlying the experience: we avoid picking up snake-shaped things, and avoid stepping in front of train-shaped things. Symbols such as these keep us alive, so we have to take them seriously.

Hoffman calls his theory conscious realism. In this theory, objective reality comprises conscious agents, and only conscious agents. When a person has an operation that splits the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of our brains, evidence suggests that the person can end up with two separate consciousnesses. But Hoffman’s mathematical models also show that when two conscious agents interact, the mathematical structure of the interaction fits the definition of a single conscious agent. We can create new observers by putting separate observers together, and we can do this ad infinitum. Conscious experiences are the most basic ingredients of the world in the theory of conscious realism. They are ontological primitives: the experiences of everyday life—the real feeling of a headache, the real taste of chocolate—comprise the ultimate nature of reality. Much more can be said about what shows up in our experience of headaches and chocolate, along with love, reason, longing, and joy. Hoffmann addresses evolutionary fitness and natural selection, but these mechanisms require a philosophical frame to understand their significance in our world. What kind of universe best accounts for the existence of such experiences?

In the preface to the second edition of Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, Owen Barfield wrote something that resonates with Hoffmann’s work (Barfield wrote the book in 1928 and the preface in 1952):

Science deals with the world it perceives but, seeking more and more to penetrate the veil of naïve perception, progresses only toward the goal of nothing, because it still does not accept in practice (whatever it may admit theoretically) that the mind first creates what it perceives as objects, including the instruments which science uses for that very penetration. It insists on dealing with ‘data,’ but there shall be no data given, save the bare percept. The rest is imagination. Only by imagination therefore can the world be known. And what is needed is, not only that larger and larger telescopes and more and more sensitive calipers should be constructed, but that the human mind should become increasingly aware of its own creative activity.¹⁶

This creative activity is poesis, and the totality of the mystery within which we show up is the apriori. Imagination is the power that allows us to approach the apriori through our creative making in all its forms. The kind of universe in which we live determines the nature of any correlation between what is revealed in our imaginative contribution to the res, and the remainder of the reality within which we appear. If there is nothing more than the forces of evolution producing maximally fit creatures by natural selection, then we have no reason to think that our creative endeavors have any correlation to the way things really are. If we live in a created universe, it is reasonable to hope that we are always on the way to discovering more and more about the apriori—reality as it is. Embracing either view of the universe is an act of faith.

Our frame affects our ideas of what we are doing when we create something. In The Republic, Plato said poets are makers of imperfect imitations of nature, which is itself an imperfect copy of eternal reality. The Neoplatonists thought true artists do not merely imitate nature as it appears but rather imitate an archetypal reality expressed through nature. Barfield borrows from the electrician’s world to describe this shift in which “the artist stands, not in series with nature, but in parallel with her.”¹⁷

The idea that art can express archetypes evokes the idea of inspiration. Inspiration can suggest that some mind or spirit possesses the artist. But it can also suggest that an individual artist qua artist is different from the same individual as he or she shows up in day-to-day life. The first kind of inspiration is a passive relation. The second is an active relation connecting the artist and the subject of the art. In one form of inspiration, the artist is taken over by a force or a being, and in the other form the artist produces something in the art that has been grasped through personal effort.¹⁸

What do poets show us in their poems? What do we learn to see? Human minds have an inside that can be communicated to other minds. Do things in nature have an analogous inside we can learn to see? If we live in a universe of dead matter, upon which the epiphenomena of living minds accidentally appear for brief time, we are right to be skeptical about the idea of nature having any sort of inside that resonates—all musical connotations intended—with our own minds. But Barfield believed there is more to a thing than what we can measure. He argued that consciousness evolved from vagueness to a kind of central precision. In this process of evolution, pervasive awareness of our own subjective consciousness has grown through the medium of language, reversing the assumption that matter preceded mind in the history of the universe.¹⁹ Language holds the clues to this evolution of consciousness. The history of this evolution has important implications for our view of the universe.

Language expresses our relationship to the world in a way that reveals something not only about our own minds but also about the world’s inherent meaning. We use the objects of the outer world to express elements of our own inner world of thought. We are able to do this, not because these outer objects are mere signs for our own inward impulses, but because they are symbols for our ideas: things represent something besides themselves. The forms in the world are converted by memory into mental images that function as symbols for concepts. This is how language emerges. Language makes abstract thought possible. The symbolic significance in our language is inherent in the forms of the outer world, implying that some metaphors are natural rather than artificial.²⁰ The fundamental distinction we experience between inner and outer, which allows self-consciousness to emerge from consciousness, results from the symbolizing power that makes language possible. Human beings did not start out as self-conscious beings dwelling in an objective world, trying to make an inadequate copy of the world in their minds. Our subjectivity peeled itself off the world by gradually introducing dualities into the world through language. The evolution of language occurred as part of the process of polarizing the world into inner/outer and subjective/objective. Language gave us the capacity to experience ourselves as on onlookers in the world.²¹

Self-consciousness created a distance between ourselves and nature. It reoriented our minds toward nature, allowing us to acquire the ability to measure, describe, and control it in increasingly clever, useful, and destructive ways. It also blinded us to the meaning of nature, including human nature. Just as understanding a word is different from describing its color and shape, grasping the meaning of a thing is different from measure and manipulating it. But to understand the meaning of a word, one must believe that words have meanings we can discover. Likewise, to read meaning in nature, including our own nature, we need the capacity to register meaning, along with a philosophical frame with room for the possibility that there is something meaningful in nature to be read.

Self-consciousness reveals the threshold between ourselves and nature. It also reveals a threshold within ourselves—an awareness that consciousness is more than self-consciousness and that this consciousness beyond self-consciousness is real and accessible. Acquaintance between Western and Eastern approaches to philosophy, psychology, and religion has deepened exploration of the so-called unconscious mind and the power of the imagination. We have learned more about the difference between an image and that of which it is an image. This difference is also a relationship. The relationship is illuminated by the ancient notion of inspiration, not as some tame version of a vaguely poetic Muse but as “the deadly serious doctrine of mania (divine frenzy, divine possession, enthusiasmos) … something more like what happened to the Cumaean Sibyl before she began to speak to Virgil.”²²

The imagination works at the thresholds between self and not-self, conscious and unconscious, mind and matter, human and divine. If we view the imagination as an isolated, self-involved faculty, creating artifacts that are irrelevant to our discovery of reality, we will never grasp its significance. But once we accept the imagination as a power that allows us to see both sides of these thresholds in our search for the truth of the whole, we will understand how philosophical imagination leads us to a kind of knowledge we can gain in no other way.

We know that practice is required to reach the deep parts of a discipline. We do many mathematical problems before we have minds capable of mathematical discovery. We repeat the experiments of others in the laboratory before we become scientists capable of independent investigation and discovery in the realm of the natural world. The same is true for philosophical imagination, which is developed and strengthened as it learns to use images, metaphors, and symbols. This changes the imagination’s relationship to language, as a mathematician’s relationship to the order within equations changes with practice and experience. The mind learns how to reach beyond horizons that seemed fixed. It learns to apprehend and express new aspects of reality, including the reality of our own minds.²³ This is what Husserl gestured toward when he described the inexhaustible infinity of apriori in our minds.

Language is the storehouse of the imagination. It mediates the transition from the immersed but unindividualized consciousness—Vico’s imaginative universals, Eliot’s immediate experience—to the mind capable of self-consciousness and awareness of the world as other than itself. Language carries the history of human consciousness within itself. If we forget the spirit from which language grew, we impoverish it, turning it into manipulative slogans to gain power over others or using it to express mere facts without meaning. When we do this, we cut ourselves off from important kinds of knowledge about ourselves and the world. The stakes are high but the context is as ordinary as daily life, in which our imaginations are empowered by metaphor to experience the world as a world instead of as mere sense data. All meaningful knowledge in and of the world comes to us through analogy. Apart from the imagination’s power of analogy and metaphor, we are left only with unconnected facts and data, rather than a cosmos that hangs together.²⁴

In Vico’s theory of the imaginative universal, the theological poets did not have the power of abstraction. The poetic wisdom by which they ordered, named, and navigated the world expressed a kind of metaphorical value that was constitutive of meaning. Metaphor was not imposed upon the world, it unveiled the truth of the world. This is why our understanding of what kind of universe we live in matters so much. If we live in a mostly dead, accidental, purposeless universe, the history of the evolution of consciousness preserved in language is nothing more than a quirky detail about how we came to be what we are. The story might have been otherwise. It says nothing about the world as it is, beyond the anthropological curiosity of the time creatures appeared in the universe who experienced the cosmos poetically—one more odd, random fact in the universe. But if we live in a created universe where mind is ontologically primary, the order of the universe is suffused with purpose. There is more to the story than accidental, purposeless matter (whatever matter is). The connections and relationships between things in the world, and between these things and our feelings and ideas about them, are not merely the inventions of poets but reveal something about the world our relation to the world. Before the development of the mind’s conscious power of abstraction, this unity in relation was directly perceived even if minds were not conscious of the relation as a relation. But a mind can lose its ability to see the unity that is the foundation of real relation. We cannot unlearn our capacity for abstract thought, but we can and should ask how we can nurture our ability to see unity. When poets create true metaphors, their language restores our concept of unity, even if we can no longer directly perceive it. The imagination can re-mind us, literally, of the relationships that inhere in the cosmos. Through the imagination we can learn to see again, achieving that which Eliot called transcendent experience.

There are two forces operating in this developed consciousness. One force splits meaning into separate, isolated concepts. The other perceives resemblances among things and strives to understand what they are. Poets try to express these relations in true metaphors that hint at the living reality torn apart by pure intellect functioning independently of imagination.²⁵ This is precisely what is meant by the poetic apriori. Metaphors are created by poets. When the metaphors are true, they register something eternal that can be perceived in thought through the operation of both forces of consciousness in one mind—the rational principle, which is conscious of poetry, and the poetic principle, which makes poetry.²⁶ Consciousness learns to oscillate between these two forces without reducing one to the other. As the oscillation between imaginative reach and contemplative reflection intensifies, poetry is increasingly created from the fullness of self-consciousness.²⁷

In a created world, where the universe as a whole has meaning, poets do not create poetry from nothing. They find metaphors that awaken our consciousness of meaning. But they risk error and imprecision when the meanings they try to express reach beyond the definitions of words that reify our fixed ideas about the world. Logic governs the arrangement of stable terms within propositions to eliminate error. But the poetic reaches for fresh meaning from inside individual words, enlivening them through new combinations that allow surprising light to shine on and through the words. In the great poet, just as in the great scientist, rationality must be developed along with imagination’s power to reach toward the unfamiliar and the unknown. All great discovery in poetry and science depends upon this. If only one of these forces is developed, the result is bad poetry and bad science: “If the poetic is unduly ascendant, behold the mystic or the madman, unable to grasp the reality of percepts at all—of being still resting, as it were, in the bosom of gods or demons—not yet a man, man in the fullness of his stature, at all. But if the passive, logistic, prosaic principle dominates, then the man becomes—what? the collector, the man who cannot grasp the reality of anything but percepts.”²⁸

Philosophical imagination remains open to strangeness in the created universe. It fosters rationality to understand what is discovered along the way. But it also nurtures the force of creative intuition, imagination’s power to make revealing metaphors and to perceive analogies, because this is the only way in which consciousness is expanded and knowledge is grown. This is a beautiful and strange world. Our sense of its strangeness arises when we come in contact with consciousnesses besides our own, human or otherwise, initially inspiring wonder and then, as we come to understand something about the strangeness we meet, aesthetic imagination.²⁹ In a created universe, the conceptual frame for such contact is the analogia entis—an idea that takes the mind to the limits of language. It expresses the meaning of creation, the transcendence of the creator, and the reality of God’s analogical immanence in creation. It is the reason for our hope that philosophical imagination can grow in knowledge of the created universe, which also deepens our comprehension of God’s incomprehensibility. Because the analogia entis is a kind of knowledge, imperfectly expressed in images, likenesses, and metaphors, it motivates our desire to say the as-yet unsayable, and it turns us toward worship when we break past the limits of language into the fullness of silence where we meet the God beyond analogy.

¹  Thomas Stearns Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley, Columbia University Press, New York (1989), 18.

²  Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, 100.

³  Thomas Stearns Eliot, „Four Quartets,“ T.S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York (1978), 123. All quotations of Eliot’s poetry are from this edition.

⁴  Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, 205.

⁵  Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, 31.

⁶ Eliot, „Whispers of Immortality,” 32.

⁷  Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, 167.

⁸  NRSV Genesis 2:19.

⁹  Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, 134.

¹⁰  Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, 132.

¹¹  Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, 169.

¹²  Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, 168.

¹³  T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1961), 59–60.

¹⁴  Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, 168–69.

¹⁵  Amanda Gefter, „The case against reality,” The Atlantic Magazine, April 25, 2016.

¹⁶  Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut (1973), 28.

¹⁷  Owen Barfield, Speaker‘s Meaning, Barfield Press, Oxford (2011), 48.

¹⁸  Barfield, Speaker‘s Meaning, 56.

¹⁹  Barfield, Speaker‘s Meaning, 78.

²⁰  Owen Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning, The Barfield Press, California (1977), 19.

²¹  Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning, 20–21.

²²  Barfield, Speaker‘s Meaning, 175.

²³  Barfield, Speaker‘s Meaning, 188.

²⁴  Barfield, Poetic Diction, 56.

²⁵  Barfield, Poetic Diction, 88.

²⁶ Barfield, Poetic Diction, 103.

²⁷  Barfield, Poetic Diction, 110.

²⁸ Barfield, Poetic Diction, 139.

²⁹ Barfield, Poetic Diction, 177.