Magical Poetics

Just like a magician, spiritual guide or modern-day witch, poets use their craft to tap into the inherent power of language as an agent of change, willing words to construct and alter reality through intentional acts and performances.

Through an examination of the linguistic, historical, and affective poetics of magic, this book shows how pragmatic magical practices from the ancient and Medieval worlds, and poetry from the English Romantics to the present day, leverage the same linguistic qualities to bring about change.

Making the case that contemporary poets, especially poets of disenfranchised identity groups, write with language meant to do something, Robert Eric Shoemaker highlights how these writers successfully incant through language, using techniques such as metaphor, symbolism, chant and other magics, to change their readers by leveraging slippages of meaning. Drawing on the long histories of magical, religious, and ritual language, from modernist poets through the English Romantics and stretching back to poems and spells from the Middle Ages and ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Jewish traditions, this book establishes a theoretical, analytic, and practical framework for magical poetics. An introduction to the theory and topic, Magical Poetics manages and expands on important poetic legacies, establishes frameworks of contemporary practitioners and aids today’s writers and readers in seeing the importance of poetry in the everyday, positioning them as part of the larger lineage of poet-hierophants who may work to change the world with words.