Potlatch

...Whitman provides plentiful evidence of the artist's connection to eros and to the gift...

...It will never be an easy coexistence, and we are still a long way from providing the gift with a secure place in society...

...Gift exchange creates a relationship, whereas the exchange of money for goods leaves nothing in its aftermath...

...The market, despite its alienating and atomizing tendencies, is both remarkably efficient and relatively free...

...John Junkerman (John Junkerman is a free-lance writer in Boston and a member of the National Writers Union...

...Hyde notes that Whitman lost money on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, and Pound earned but $1.85 in American royalties in 1915...

...Hyde reminds us that just as the gift of fortune in the Lithuanian folk tale turns to paper when it is counted, the market destroys the "organic cohesion we perceive as liveliness" by making private property of the gift...

...Hyde understands gift property as having a generative, integrating, community-building nature that is associated with the Greek eros...

...This is true even when the artist receives payment...

...Hyde's discourse on the imagination and creativity will be of particular interest to writers and artists, but his theme of the market's inversion of true worth and its violation of natural bonds touches us all...

...But the gift does not stop with the artist...

...The Gift is a pioneering effort to understand the "commerce of the creative spirit" and its place in a world dominated by the entirely different (and largely incompatible) market economy...

...In a Lithuanian folk tale, fairies bestow riches upon mortals, but the fortune turns to paper when it is counted...

...Pound's was a futile and wrong-headed struggle...

...Both poets died poor...

...From these and a wide array of other examples of gifts and their treatment, Lewis Hyde constructs a theory of gift exchange, or what amounts to a sub-economy of the spirit...

...Because gifts carry an obligation to reciprocate, they have momentum...

...Using folk tales, the anthropology of gift exchange, contemporary gift situations (such as organ transplants), and other examples, Hyde demonstrates that gifts have special attributes that distinguish them from commodities: Gifts increase through use and disappear if they are not used...

...The detoxification programs of Alcoholics Anonymous are free...

...We experience it daily in the commercial culture of television and in the "crimes against the imagination" committed in the name of profit...

...He brought the same spirit to his service as a nurse during the Civil War, when he made daily rounds of army hospitals, dispensing gifts of candy, clothing, and comfort to the wounded...

...Whitman made a vessel of himself, Hyde writes, to breathe in the wonder of natural and social creation, and then to exhale enthusiastic affirmation...

...Because artists operate in the realm of the gift rather than in that of the commodity, they face difficulties making a living...

...The Kwakiutl and other American Indians of the North Pacific measured the wealth of their chiefs by the abundance of gifts distributed during potlatch ceremonies...

...We often speak of the artist as being "gifted," without being entirely clear whether we mean this literally or metaphorically...

...Hyde's book is a welcome contribution toward that goal...

...He tried, in his tragic embrace of Italian fascism and anti-Semitism, to turn back the market economy and revive the imagination...

...The economy of gift exchange is, by its nature, limited to small groups, and it imposes emotional burdens as a price for social cohesion...

...The Maori of New Zealand "feed the spirit" of the forest a portion of the game they kill, in the belief that this will sustain the natural cycle that provides their sustenance...

...we may buy a book of poetry, for example, and the poet may receive a royalty, but we still experience whatever beauty or wisdom is captured in the poems as a gift...

...In "Song of Myself the poet writes: "I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags./I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love...

...It is the poet's task to give concrete meaning to words and ideas, and Hyde does his job skillfully...

...Hyde calls instead for a reconciliation, the acknowledgment of the double economy—gift and market—in which the artist operates...

...Hyde, a poet in Massachusetts, is attempting to make his way as a "scholar without institution" and began this book to examine the tension between art and the market...

...After the imagination has transformed inspiration into a work of art, it is, in turn, passed on to the audience in the form of a gift, Hyde contends...

...And Pound's rage at usury (usura) is a familiar complaint in a world that rewards schlock over art and shadow over substance: "No picture is made to endure nor to live with/but is made to sell and sell quickly/with usura, sin against nature...

...The heart of the problem, Hyde suggests, is the "old lover's quarrel between liberty and community...

...He then applies this framework to art and the labors of the imagination, focusing on the poets Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound...

...Hyde's book is challenging, if a touch obscure at times (largely because he is traveling uncharted territory and the powers of gifts are mysterious...

...However, by illustrating his discussion with anecdotes— a process he compares to Kipling's Just So Stories—Hyde provides the reader with ready access to complex philosophy...

...As Pound's life demonstrates,.^ is fruitless to attempt to destroy money or the market...

...Pound was perhaps equally sensitive to the spirit of eros, but his life and work were colored by bitterness toward a modern society that placed little value on art...

...the only obligation is to help others get off the bottle after one has fully recovered from alcoholism...

...Commonly held or circulated social property loses these characteristics when it enters the market, which is dominated by rational, individuating, and differentiating principles—the Greek logos...

...He cites many examples of what apparently is common experience among artists—the sensation that their creative impulse comes to them from an external source (from the Muse, or whoever, wherever, or however, writes poet Gary Snyder...

...Hyde's starting premise is that creative inspiration is, indeed, a gift...