And of course she’s not alone. Countless thousands of thoughtful and intelligent people have had experiences of a kind that they call religious. James paid them the compliment of taking these experiences seriously, and produced a classic of psychological insight. But could there be a Varieties of Magical Experience? Could the mental universe that produced witch bottles and sigil, and grimoires, and the whole idea of magic itself, be rich enough to sustain an examination of that sort? Powerful angels, just as this frog drips with blood and dries up, so also will the body of him, NN whom NN bore, because I adjure you, who are in command of fire, Maskelli Maskellō (add the rest, the usual).

These poems capture the experience of liminality, highness, and the dream state. As you write, you are channeling, translating, and creating a space of sacred connection. A spell is an active, dynamic thing — one that is created as it is cast. Every time you read the poem aloud afterward, it can call on that same energy. See #5 in Russell Meiggs and David Lewis, Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1969). As a discourse describing non-normative religious activity, magic thus exists in the ancient Greek world even before the term magikē or its cognates comes into use. Such magic before magic appears in the literature of the Greeks before the Persian war, and the discourse of magic as a way of labelling extraordinary ritual performance or activity goes beyond the uses of any one of the terms that are used to describe it. Read Danez Smith’s “ Dinosaurs in the Hood.”What kind of magic or fantasy appears in these poems? What purpose does it serve? Have you ever wished you could re-write your story?So begins this Victorian poem which offers us an ambiguous ‘witch’ as its (initial) speaker: she appears to be some sort of outcast, making a journey to visit a man, perhaps her beloved. Is she a depiction of the much-shunned Victorian ‘fallen woman’? She has the power to make the fire die in the grate, so she seems to possess some otherworldly power or aura. Coleridge was the great-grand-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Cool observation: detached and depersonalized viewpoints and characters, usually informal, sometimes unfinished. Here are 15 of the best poems about magic, sourced from a variety of cultures, traditions, and poets, both ancient and modern. Included are poems about witchcraft, fairies, and enchanted woods, as well as the magic of love and the magic of awareness. If you enjoy these magic poems enough, perhaps you’ll consider practicing a little magic yourself. Maybe even by writing magical poetry. “Her Kind” by Anne Sexton It is sometimes difficult to express our love to another. Yet the gift of love to another is precious. Whether it’s our own unique love poems that tell the story of our heart or whether we choose a poem for our beloved that speaks for us, drawing on the wisdom of culture, whether it be words from I Ching, or one of the poems of Shakespeare, Burns, Rosetti and more. A love poem could become the perfect gift for your 25th wedding anniversary– after so much time together your gift ideas could have come to an end so something personal like this could be the perfect solution!

The argument of Seppilli’s Poesia e magia is briefly stated by the literary critic Thomas Greene: ‘the invocation as prayer lies in a middle position between magical rites, which were regarded as coercive, and poetic invocations which are not expected to produce the literal results they request’. In many languages, a word like ‘carmen’ was used first to mean charm before it came to mean poem. In other words, poetry evolved out of magic, and is related to prayer. The exhibition will celebrate Seppilli’s insight and approach by bringing together a series of objects and art works to create cross-cultural dialogues that will explore the relationship of poetry and magic. When I seek new poems by others or return to my favorite works, I am looking for this same experience. In this way the act of poetry is at root, a form of radical worship. Through its creation the creator is also changed—elements of the spontaneous, which are a hallmark of effective poems—contribute to a transformative rawness, or honesty. This in turn cultivates a sense of possibility. The online database Thesaurus Defixionum Magdeburgensis now provides texts for over 1,700 published curse tablets, many with translations and additional information, and the database is searchable, which provides an enormous resource for scholars. The most accessible English translation of a variety of tablets is in John G. Gager, ed., Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Read Ilya Kaminsky’s “ We Lived Happily During the War,” which imagines America’s end. What kind of magic appears in these poems? What purpose does it serve? What is true about this story despite all that is fictional about it? Karl Preisendanz and Albert Henrichs, Papyri Graecae Magicae: Die Griechischen Zauberpapyri, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, Germany: Teubner, 1973); William M. Brashear, “The Greek Magical Papyri,” Aufsteig Und Niedergang Der Römischen Welt II 18 (1995): 3380–3684; and Hans Dieter Betz, ed., The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic Spells, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Translations of the PGM in this article are taken from Betz.The label of magic appears in a variety of evidence from the ancient Greek world, but the different kinds of evidence provide different kinds of self-labelling and labelling of others. Works of the literary imagination, from early epic to late novels, provide some of the richest and most detailed descriptions; these depictions, however, are not meant to be portrayals of the real world, but rather of the way magic works in the imagination. Other texts, such as histories or law court speeches, provide a more accurate depiction of how the label was applied in the real world, but they tend to be more limited in their details. The material evidence, including not only epigraphic and papyrological texts but also artistic representations in various materials, provide a more direct witness to what the ancient Greeks were actually doing, especially for the self-labelling of magic, but such evidence is always scattered, fragmentary, and difficult to interpret. Experimentation: moving away from stereotypes into technical innovation, poems were seen to be a ruthless rejection of the past, a deviation from the usual reader expectations. This shadow world – the state that Keats called “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” – is where the imagination is at home, and so are ghosts and dreams and gods and devils and witches. There, possibilities are unlimited, and nothing is forbidden.

Poetrymagic.co.uk is a small publishing company exploiting the new possibilities of the internet and electronic publishing to produce independent specialist guides of a literary nature. Read Natalie Diaz’s “ No More Cake Here.” What kind of magic appears in these poems? What kind of party does Diaz imagine, and what purpose does it serve? What story does it tell about the speaker’s brother, and why might she have chosen to write a poem like this to tell that story?Our next members’ poems competition will be on the theme of ‘Broken Vessels’, proposed by our judge Naush Sabah. Naush is a writer, editor, critic, and educator based in the West Midlands. In 2019, she co-founded Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal where she is currently Editor and Publishing Director. I find it endlessly fascinating, and I call that world “imaginary” not to disparage or belittle it. Imagination is one of our highest faculties, and wherever it appears, however it “bodies forth / The forms of things unknown” (Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), I want to treat it with respect. At its most intense it becomes a kind of perception, as in William Blake’s notion of “Twofold Vision”, by which he means what we see when we look “not with but through the eye”: the state of mind in which we can “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”. Other poets describe something similar: in Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” he recalls a time “when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream.” Thomas Traherne’s vision of “orient and immortal wheat” in the everyday corn comes from the same apprehension. What kinds of things do you think of when you think of magic? Do you believe in magic? What communities or culture consider magic to be real or important? What purpose does that serve?

Photograph of an Iraqi Boy and a US Marine in a House in Ramadi, West of Baghdad James Bell Members' Poems - Shoes November 2023, 6.30pm. Michael Phillips – Blake and Italy. Michael Phillips, master printmaker and leading expert on William Blake, will explore the influence of Italian art on Blake’s work. No doubt more could be said, but the starting poet may be feeling impatient. Theorists, like clever lawyers, can prove anything, and it is all too easy for an atrocious piece of writing to be defended by irrefutable standards. Are there not more practical ways of assessing poetry? Jacco Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (100– 300 CE), Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 153 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2005); Edward O. D. Love, Code-Switching with the Gods: The Bilingual (Old Coptic-Greek) Spells of PGM IV (P. Bibliothèque Nationale Supplément Grec. 574) and Their Linguistic, Religious, and Socio-Cultural Context in Late Roman Egypt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016); Ljuba Bortolani, Magical Hymns from Roman Egypt: A Study of Greek and Egyptian Traditions of Divinity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Athanassia Zografou, Papyrus Magiques Grecs: Le Mot et Le Rite. Autour Des Rites Sacrificiels, Παράρτημα‎ 85 (Ioannina, Greece: Panepistimio Ioanninon, 2013). Poems are not created by recipe, or by pouring content into a currently acceptable mould. Shape and content interact, in the final product and throughout the creation process, so that the poems will be continually asking what you are writing and why. The answers you give yourself will be illustrating your conceptions of poetry. Once again, those conception will develop – eventually to include experiences more viscerally part of you, since poems are not a painless juggling with words.His most famous work, The Divine Comedy, is as rich in science, astronomy, and philosophy, and as it is rooted in 14th-century Catholicism and Italian politics. The epic describes Dante’s imagined journey through Hell and Purgatory to Heaven. Inferno, the most popular and widely studied section of The Divine Comedy, recounts Dante’s travels through the different regions ofHell, led by his mentor and protector, the Roman poet Virgil. In his translation of Inferno, Mark Musa writes, “Dante invites us to read his poem as he expects us to read the Bible, that is, to believe in the historical truth of the literal level. And this extends to the figural symbolism of the main characters in the allegory of the poem. We are not dealing with consistent or typical allegory ... his is much more sophisticated.” Constructed as a huge funnel with nine descending circular ledges, Dante’s Hell features a vast, meticulously organized torture chamber in which sinners, carefully classified according to the nature of their sins, suffer hideous punishment, often depicted with ghoulish attention to detail. Sinners who recognize and repudiate their sins are given the opportunity to attain Paradise through the arduous process of purification, which continues in Purgatorio. A shift from human reason to divine revelation takes place in Purgatory, a place where penitents awaiting the final journey to Paradise continually reaffirm their faith and atone for the sins they committed on earth. A mood of brotherly love, modesty, and longing for God prevails in Purgatory. Although in Hell, Virgil—a symbol of human reason—helps Dante understand sin, in Purgatory the poet needs a more powerful guide who represents faith: Beatrice. Finally, Paradiso manifests the process of spiritual regeneration and purification required to meet God, who rewards the poet with perfect knowledge. Want to try one? This 11-line poetry spell for healing is accessible and potent. Write automatically The important thing is to be aware of both. Imagination can give us an empathetic understanding of the world of magic; reason reminds us that the cast of mind that persecuted witches is still alive. The Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy appeals to the same dark instinct. The Varieties of Magical Experience still has to be written, as far as I know; and it will only be done successfully by someone who engages the subject with both reason and imagination. Spellbound would be a very good place to start. Chess at Baden-Baden, 1925 Duncan Chambers Winner, Hamish Canham Prize 2018. Members' Poems - Elegant The man had stopped by our Guru’s tent for tea the previous day, and had felt weird that night, as if he’d lost his energy. To put it another way, he had lost his mojo – and he believed it was because of my Guru’s magic.