Spellbound

FOREWORD

 
Cultural anthropologists of an earlier era, like the field’s founding father E. B. Tylor, regarded magic as an archaic belief system utterly vanquished by modern science.  Tylor, however, failed to take into account the persistence of the primitive in the civilized world. While it’s true that few of us pursue our goals by occult means, magical thinking is evident in many areas of contemporary life. Shopkeepers frame their first dollar bills as good luck charms. Professional athletes refuse to take the field without lacing their shoes in a ritualistic manner.  Wedding guests throw rice to ensure fertility in the newlyweds.  Car owners believe that washing their vehicles is a guaranteed way to bring on rain.  We may no longer believe that trees are the sacred habitations of deities but many of us still knock on wood, and the most confirmed atheist is likely to say “God bless you” when someone sneezes.  As the historian of magic Chris Gosden has observed, while we rationalists may scoff at the notion that we can injure our enemies by sticking pins into their effigies, “most of us would find it very hard to stab a photo of a loved one.”

That our modern, technologically advanced Western society is shot-through with magic should come as no surprise since, on its deepest levels, the human psyche continues to operate much as it did in prehistoric times.  And like other fundamental phenomena that define who and what we are as a species--love and aggression, morality and religion, dream and fantasy--magic, as the selections in this anthology show, has been a central subject of poetry.

There is another link between poetry and magic.  Because they often have the sense that their art springs from an arcane source of power--that “they are merely conduits for a force beyond themselves” (in the words of Paul Muldoon)--poets sometimes speak of their creative process as a form of conjuring.  The outstanding example is William Butler Yeats, an ardent devotee of the occult arts, who viewed himself as a magus, evoking his poems from a mystical, transcendent realm.  Shakespeare, too, viewed his art in much the same light, representing himself (as scholars agree) in the figure of the magician Prospero. 

That the poet’s art depends on a form of wizardry--the ability to conjure enchantment from a particular combination of words--has become a critical truism.  As J. A. Cuddon puts it in his authoritative dictionary of literary terms, “In the final analysis what makes a poem different from any other form of composition is a species of magic.”
 
Harold Schechter
Kimiko Hahn