ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the poetry that Barfield wrote concurrently with the development of his poetics. It reveals the fashioning of his “Romantic Modernist” poetic persona in his contemporaneous poetry reviews, his complex use of the classical and Romantic traditions in “Sleep,” and his still more complex use of the Romantic tradition in his response to Eliot’s The Waste Land in his first major poem, The Tower. In a closing note, it provides an overview of Barfield’s career as a lyric poet over a seventy-year arc.
