"[Lewis] Hyde’s admirers often point out with awe (and his reviewers with frustration) that his books are all but impossible to summarize. Hyde doesn’t object to this assessment. He wrote The Gift because he could find no place where his own motivations for writing poetry were well articulated, but articulating them required a poet’s suggestiveness. “One thing I’ve always liked to read is the kind of literature you find in Jung and Freud, which combines personal anecdote, philosophy, mythology, dreams,” he told me in his Cambridge office last May. 'I like the way it jumps from one discursive realm to another.' His books exhibit this lively heterogeneity to an at-times dizzying extent; in the course of 12 pages in “The Gift,” Hyde hops from a discussion of a Pali Buddhist parable to Marx’s “Capital” to the Ford Pinto and then moves quickly on, in the next 3 pages, to Christmas, country-western music and the psychological fates of Vietnamese refugees in Southern California."
Yes! This is what I want to do in my poems, except without the country-western music and the Pinto. (Or, maybe with the Pinto. But definitely not the country-western music.) (Figuratively speaking.) But with non-discursive realms included.
I know I've heard of Lewis Hyde, but until I read this article, I could not have told you, off the top of my head, who he is or what he writes. Good article. Time for another run to the library!
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