Owen Barfield's This Ever Diverse Pair as an Apology for the Coleridgean Imagination

Abstract

Owen Barfield's This Ever Diverse Pair (1950) is a short novel about a poet-solicitor who has torn his consciousness in two. Burden, the practical half, begrudgingly attends to paperwork; Burgeon, the creative half, hides away and writes poetry. From Walter de la Mare to the present, readers of the text have tended to identify Barfield exclusively with Burgeon. And yet if we interrogate Burgeon's digressions on the nature of art, we find that this allegedly Barfieldian half is more often used as a mouthpiece for theories manifestly antithetical to Barfield's own. This article explores an alternative reading in which Burgeon and Burden are the respective embodiments of Coleridge's faculties of imagination and fancy. Barfield's aim in writing the book is, accordingly, not to purge the Burden in us; rather, it is to offer a narrative apology for Coleridge's model, to demonstrate the ‘polar’ relationship which underlies all acts of the imagination.