Lewis Hyde: Cultural Commons

Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. He is currently at work on a book about our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to produce.

A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.