Gods of the Word – Poetry’s Best-Kept Secret with Lisa Brockwell

This two-hour seminar will introduce the key ideas in Margaret Magnus’s astonishing Gods of the Word, her groundbreaking study of the meaning of the sound in language – and a book so inexplicably neglected, it has the status of an 'occult text' for those lucky enough to discover it.  

Why does sound itself feel alive in poetry? Why does a sound seem to carry a sense independently of the word in which it appears? How might poets exploit this knowledge of sound-sense to unify the meaning, feel and emotional atmosphere of their poems?  

Following a brief introduction to Magnus’s key ideas, Lisa will then explore how poets from Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Blake through to Plath and Heaney and Diane Seuss shape, deepen and consolidate the feeling and atmosphere of their lines and poems through an awareness of ‘consonantal sense’, then suggest practical ways by which we might bring this radical…