ABSTRACT
The topic of this short chapter is poetry and enchantment. Poetry emerges as perhaps uniquely amenable to literary wonder. Yet here too its enchantment is embattled, as in other contexts, thanks to the double threat of modernist over-intellectualisation, especially academic poetry, and the vulgarisation of spectacular performance or ‘slam’ poetry on the other. These correspond to the disenchanting Apollonian and Dionysian extremes respectively, and tacitly collude in ‘poetry as a business’. The wonder of certain poems, as well as poems about wonder, are touched upon (e.g. by Yeats, Heaney, Tranströmer, and Edward Thomas).
