Recently, we’ve been discussing “poetic diction.” In William Wordsworth’s famous preface to Lyrical Ballads, the groundbreaking collection he wrote with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet argued that such diction did not have to be unique, grand or fancy but could be a "language near to the language of men." In his brilliant 1928 work Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield — one of the so-called Inklings along with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis — argued that such language was meant to reunite the material meanings of words with their lost spirituality.
There is one great poem that is an almost perfect incarnation of Barfield’s idea.