Q:  In his career Marshall McLuhan had a meteoric 
rise to pop icon status and then experienced an 
abrupt descent. Today, 15 years after his death, 
there’s a resurgence of interest in McLuhan. Can 
you explain why?

A:  Well I will take a stab at it. I think that what 
people recognized intuitively but did not put a 
name on was the fact that Marshall was not an 
analyst, not a historian, not a sociologist, but a 
poet. And what he was delivering to the world was 
a set of metaphors that we had to wrestle with, 
that worked at the essential metaphoric level of 
poetry, meaning he had had a vision of the way in