Spellbound: Poems of Magic and Enchantment - Couverture rigide

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0593536312 ISBN 13 : 9780593536315

Editeur : Everyman's Library, 2024

Synopsis

A unique anthology of poems from around the world and through the ages that celebrate magic and magicians

No matter how modern or scientifically advanced our societies become, human beings remain perpetually enthralled by the idea of magic, from our daily superstitions to our choices of entertainment. Magic has long been a central subject of poetry, and the poems in this collection are evocative evidence that the poet’s art depends on a form of wizardry—the ability to conjure enchantment from a particular combination of words.

Venerable literary wizards such as Shakespeare's Prospero, Tennyson's Merlin, and T. S. Eliot's Mr. Mistoffelees make appearances here alongside illusionists and prestidigitators in Kay Ryan's "Houdini," Ted Kooser's "Card Trick," Charles Simic's "My Magician," and Richard Wilbur's "The Mind-Reader." Here is a treasury of poetic spells, charms, and incantations, from Elise Paschen's "Love Spell," Robert Graves's "Love and Black Magic," and Lu Yu's "The Pedlar of Spells," to a Cherokee "Spell to Destroy Life." And here, too, are all sorts of sorcerers, conjurers, enchantresses, and witches, as captured in Emily Dickinson's "Best Witchcraft is Geometry," Michael Schmidt's "Nine Witches," and H. D.'s "Circe," keeping company with magical poems from cultures around the world.  

Everyman's Library's Pocket Poets are pocket-sized hardcovers that feature acid-free cream-colored paper bound in a full-cloth case with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, a silk ribbon marker, a European-style half-round spine, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

KIMIKO HAHN is the author of ten books of poems, including Foreign Bodies (2020). Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. She is a former president of the Poetry Society of America and a current chancellor of the American Academy of Poets. 

HAROLD SCHECHTER is a professor emeritus of American literature and culture at Queens College, City University of New York, and the author of several mystery novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe, as well as coeditor of three previous Everyman's Library Pocket Poet volumes. He lives in New York City.

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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

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Everyman's Library
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0593536312
• ISBN 13: 9780593536315
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 256
• Éditeur: Hahn Kimiko, Schechter Harold
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible