Barfield had written the verse drama Orpheus in the 1930s, partly at the suggestion of C.S. Lewis. The play was performed only once, in 1948, and remained buried in Barfield's papers until John Ulreich, Jr., of the University of Arizona was tantalized by Barfield's allusions to it and disinterred it. He saw it through to publication in 1983 and wrote the introduction, in which he rightly praises Orpheus as "the evolution of consciousness made flesh, the thing itself in human form, the myth made fact as imaginative experience."