SOURCE: Potts, Donna L. “‘The Mind's Eye Lit the Sun’: Imagination as the Agent of Reality.” In Howard Nemerov and Objective Idealism: The Influence of Owen Barfield, pp. 7-37. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994.

In the following chapter from her full-length study of the influence of objective idealist Owen Barfield on Nemerov, Potts discusses the inseparability of human consciousness from the creation of reality in Nemerov's work.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.

As Thoreau approached the end of his stay at Walden Pond, he spoke with certainty of a “living...