ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the two romance poems that Barfield wrote in quick succession soon after he completed Angels at Bay. It argues that alongside The Tower they are his most significant poetic expression of Romantic Modernism. It demonstrates that The Unicorn draws on numerous Medieval and Romantic sources but is an ironic poem with an uncertain resolution, and that Riders on Pegasus is Barfield’s most fully mythopoeic work, in the tradition of William Blake’s prophetic poems and Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, as well as being a response to Barfield’s contemporaries T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden at mid-century.
