#owenbarfield

Or it may be that the poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked this final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission. If this is so, one may regard the traditionalism of the Inklings, not as a return to the past, but as the past still alive in the present, as the spirit of World War I poetry, the last articulation of ordered innocence, finding new voice amidst the nearly incessant wars of flesh, mind, and spirit that marked the twentieth century.