Lewis Hyde‘s books include Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (FSG, 2010), The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (Random House 1983; reprinted 2007), Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (FSG, 1998), and the book of poems This Error is the Sign of Love (Milkweed Editions, 1988). He has edited a volume of essays on Henry David Thoreau and a book of responses to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, and has translated the selected poems of Vicente Aleixandre. Hyde’s many awards include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lannan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1991 he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. He is currently the Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College.
In addition to Pablo Neruda, Hyde has translated Spain’s 1976 Nobel laureate, Vicente Aleixandre.
Nonfiction
Summer 2010
Liberty to Communicate
Excerpt from Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership* Truth Has No Thinker In the late 1740s Benjamin Franklin and three of his Philadelphia friends conducted a series of scientific […]
Nonfiction
Winter 2008
Being Good Ancestors: Reflections of Arts Funding since World War II
Around 1978 I wrote a letter to a poet I had never met, Robert Hass, telling him how much I liked an essay about James Wright that he had just […]
Editor's Notes
Winter 1997
Editor’s Notes
American Memory, American Forgetfulness …. The photograph on our cover dates from 1915 and shows San Diego’s Victorian railway depot being demolished to make way for the newly completed Mission […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1996
Two Accidents: Reflections on Chance and Creativity
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to […]
Orpheus. Descending.
Winter 1996
The Land of the Dead
I. Coyote’s Impulse In the winter of 1929-30, Archie Phinney went to the Fort Lapwai Indian reservation in northeastern Idaho to record stories told by his sixty-year-old mother, Wayfilatpu, […]
Poetry
Summer 1993
Elegy for John Cage
12 August 1992 Asked once to put his philosophy in a nutshell . . . he put it like this: ‘Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.’ […]
Editorials
Autumn 1990
The Freedom to Talk Dirt
The current debate over obscenity, government funding, and the arts has set me to thinking about dirt, what it is and why we have such trouble with it. “Dirt is […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1980
Transformation & the Labor of Gratitude
The old engraving reproduced on the cover shows gifts being given out at a funeral, a custom common in Wales a century or more ago. The coffin was placed on […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1979
Some Food We Could Not Eat: Gift Exchange and the Imagination
I would like to write an economy of the imagination. I assume any “property system” expresses our own spirit—or rather, one of our spirits, for there are many ways to […]
Cultures of Creativity: The Centennial Celebration of the Nobel Prizes
Spring 2001
Dead Gallop
From the Spanish. From Residencia en la Tierra (1925-31) Like ashes, like seas breeding into themselves, in the sunken slowness, in the formless, or the way one hears from high […]
Cultures of Creativity: The Centennial Celebration of the Nobel Prizes
Spring 2001
The Widower’s Tango
From the Spanish. From Residencia en la Tierra (1925-31) Oh Maligna, now you've found the letter, now you've cried with rage, and you've insulted the memory of my mother, […]