Poetic Diction

One general criticism I may make of "modern" writers (I put modern in quotes for to speak of modern in the post-modern, post-structuralist, deconstructive literary world is a bit bizarre to say the least) is that they are superficial. The modern literary scene is like going to watch "Lost in Translation" by the immature Sophia Coppola. You feel like you are touring a country or a culture, getting a sense of it flavor and then, just when you become a bit interested, they shift the gear to emotional overdrive and you're supposed to cry, but the characters have not even been fully developed yet. Modern writers are superficial. I admit that I am superficial, but I'm not really a writer. I am an amateur.

Owen Barfield who was a minor influence on Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Nemerov, Joseph Campbell wrote a fascinating book on Poetic diction and its relations to levels of consciousness. In Philosophical Double Vision, he outlines the levels of consciousness as developed by Indian yogi over time (consciousness, personal unconscious, collective unconscious, pure unconscious).

The relationship of poetic diction ( an arrangement of words which produces an effect on the levels of consciousness which produces a multiple meaning) to logos is something that creates language in the primitive soul... thus he argues, using subtlety, analogy, logic, and historical analysis.

Metaphor is something that magically synthesized consciousness with logos, according to Barfield.