For all its ancient authority, the view that poetry and magic were in many senses overlapping enterprises had been largely discredited by the 18th century, particularly within elite, educated communities of the West. The shift to print culture recast folk knowledge of the supernatural as superstition. The break was marked legally in England with the Witchcraft Act of 1735, which transformed the status of magical practices. No longer were these to be prosecuted as a species of demonic commerce – dark arts to be stamped out by ducking stools and burning at the stake. They were, instead, recategorised as a scam. The problem with magic was not that it unleashed unearthly powers; it was illegal because it was a fraud practiced on the ignorant and uneducated.

Through this same period, we see the emergence of what Simon During has called “secular magic” – theatrical magic of the kind performed today by the likes of Cosentino and David Copperfield (prior to his fall into #MeToo disrepute, that is).¹ Essential to this kind of magic, as During presents it, is that it is fully understood by its audiences as illusion. They see it as a show, not as demonic possession or paranormal summoning. We may well be amazed when the stage magician appears to saw the glamorous assistant in two. But our amazement stems from our appreciation of the cleverness of the trick we have been unable to spot, not from any genuine belief that she has been sliced in half and then had her legs miraculously rejoined to her torso. In During’s account, magic gained a new social licence in modernity by relocating in this way into the realm of the aesthetic. Yet through that very shift, magic was also brought back into renewed proximity with poetry. So, the break effected between poetry and magic by the modern disenchantment of the world turned out to be the occasion for their reunion in a new mode. It was as if magic and poetry were separated – cut off from each other – only to be rejoined as good as ever. It is an amazing trick, no question.

The three poets Pilkington examines in his book take up a highly ambivalent stance to this transformed epistemic status of magic in enlightened modernity. After all, magic may have been wholly debunked in the eyes of the law and elite culture. But non-secular magic lives on, however marginalised and officially disreputable, and modernity has always remained accompanied by an unrespectable fascination with spiritualism and the occult. Indeed, precisely thanks to its marginalisation, real magic has held considerable appeal for poets who belong to otherwise marginalised communities. So magic is queer for C.A. Conrad, for example; it is African and ancestral for Will Alexander. I am also reminded, in this context, of the collection Amiri Baraka published in 1969, titled simply Black Magic.² And as Pilkington suggests, poets have also turned to magic in part to contest the diminished status of poetry in contemporary society. For them, the occult offers a means for reclaiming the poet’s proverbial power as a seer or spellcaster. Magic, marginalised, then offers a way of challenging poetry’s own current marginalisation, its relegation to the coterie circle, the subcultural niche, or – perhaps most marginal of all – the university seminar.

Pilkington further associates the recent poetic turn to magic with ecological modes of thinking. Magical theories of correspondence converge with contemporary relational ontologies and philosophies of ecological connectedness. On this basis, Pilkington draws links between his three contemporary poets and the new materialism, which similarly seeks to re-enchant the object world and infuse materiality with mysticism. In all these respects, these poets must be understood as entirely sincere in their magical commitments. And so Pilkington sees them as effecting a sharp break with the prevalence of postmodern irony of a few decades ago. You might draw a distinction here between the sincerity of this contemporary poetic magic and the magical realism of the postmodern novel, which was always available to be read allegorically. That was a case of magic as metaphor, as Fredric Jameson once suggested.³ That magic could always be cashed out as coded realism. More recent poets, by contrast, appear to take their magic very literally.

But this new sincerity is only one side of the ambivalent relationship to magic that Pilkington identifies in his three poets. The other side is a somewhat more complicated story. A version of it might begin with magic as laying claim to be a way of doing things with words. The spell, when uttered in appropriate conditions and with the precise verbal formula required, summons up a rain cloud, or inspires sexual desire, or makes someone sicken and die. Magic then employs language as an efficient cause; rather than using language simply to narrate or describe, it puts it to work to effect and occasion. And that means magic belongs linguistically to the class of the performative, which was introduced into the philosophy of language by J.L. Austin.⁴ For Austin, statements about the world are normally judged as true or false. But such determinations are irrelevant to performative speech acts. If I say, in the appropriate conditions, that I arrest you in the name of the law, this is a statement that is neither true nor false. Rather than describing some pre-existing state of affairs, my speech act actually brings that state of affairs into being. The arresting happens in the saying of it. The appropriate evaluation for performatives is then not true or false but whether they work. And because that working is by and large social in nature – not least because it is linguistic – recursiveness is integral to performative utterances. The performative works if it is understood to work, and in being understood to work it will have worked. Austin calls this circular working, when it works, “felicity”.

As far as I know, Austin never wrote about magic. But he did turn his attention to fictional performatives: that is, to what happens when performatives are uttered within aesthetic or fictional frameworks, such as those supplied by a poem. As is well known, Austin hoped to exclude the complications of these fictional performatives from his theory. But as Jacques Derrida would argue, the fictional performative was actually the key to his whole system.⁵ To cut a long deconstruction short, Derrida showed that fictional performatives cannot be excluded from other performatives, for the two sides, fictional and non-fictional, are constantly contaminating each other. All performatives turn out to be a little bit fictional. And all fictions are a little performative. Performatives enact a fiction in the world and imbue it felicitously with the force of reality. Fictions, meanwhile, in performing something that is not real, potentially cause it to have real effects. That real effect is, for instance, the dramaturgical gambit of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, The Mousetrap. With this category of the fictional performative (or, more precisely, the never non-fictional performative), we approach an alternative understanding of how magic might work in modern – that is to say, post-Enlightenment – poetry. And there is a corollary worth noting here, for on this account, how the world works is always a little magical to the extent that it is always imbued with the fictions and performances of ideology, the myths we live by. This awards poetry a potential place as counterspell, as a magic that might dispel some of the mythic powers that hold the status quo in place.