wholly lost, contributing to the powerful spell of language. Sometimes McLuhan pushed this sense of word magic—it was akin to the primitive belief that a name expresses the essence of a thing—to eccentric lengths. He once remarked that the name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers. He believed, for example, that Richard Nixon was deeply affected by the negative connotations of the first syllable of his last name.

Richards was one of the chief critical champions of the poet T. S. Eliot, and McLuhan eagerly read Eliot as well. He was particularly taken with Eliot’s notion of the “auditory imagination,” which the poet defined as “the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to