The Gift

"The Gift is not a book about Wordsworth. The subtitle of the UK edition is “How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World”. Lewis Hyde looks at creativity not as the route to celebrity, but rather in terms of a “gift economy”. He plays off the great Marcel Mauss’s 1923 anthropological essay The Gift , building on Mauss’s idea that there’s no such thing as a free gift – when you give something, you expect something in return. If you apply this notion to creativity, thinking of creative artefacts as gifts that elicit further gifts, then you begin to understand creativity in terms of community – as an economy that is spiritual, communal, energising and potentially transformative, rather than simply egotistical, for fame and money. What this book gave me as I approached the symbiotic relationship of William and Dorothy Wordsworth was a methodology for understanding how creative artifacts circulated within their household, and also within the larger group that we talked about. Those artefacts were created for each other, to work out feelings within the group. William Wordsworth, for example, wrote about grief that was communally experienced – the grief of losing parents, a brother, and two children. His poems were consolations for other members of the family – they provided a channel for communal mourning. It’s this authentic intimacy that has made them so powerful and reparative for many generations of readers. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"