Bellow's grief over the failure of his most recent marriage colors all of Humboldt's Gift (1975). It represents a distinct change in tone. It details the extent to which modernism has depleted the inner life of the artist, the failure of poetic sensibility, the bankrupting of Western humanism, destructive rationalism, and the diminution of the private life through crisis mentality. It is a comic novel that portrays the spiritual plight of Charlie Citrine, a Chicagoan with a taste for low pursuits, gangland excitement, pneumatic young women, and a poetic gift he has almost lost. This "Chicago condition" which has destroyed his poet friend, Humboldt, engages Charlie in the same kind of contest fought by Joseph and Tu A Raison Aussi, Tommy and Tamkin, Henderson and the lioness, Herzog and the modern philosophers. Charlie sets himself up against a naturalist sexual ideology, technological rationalism, and materialistic sloth while meditating furiously on Humboldt's and American poetry's spectacular failure. As Charlie attempts to chart a path for survival, he locates the source of the malaise in a variety of places: Kinsey, Masters and Erickson, capitalism, and alienation ethics. Such failed modernist ideas, he decides, have transformed Humboldt, representative modern poet, from the young Orpheus of the Harlequin Ballads, to the manic-depressive pill taker, politician, schemer, paranoiac, and blasted tyrant who has tried to combine subterfuge with lyricism, poetic passion with worldly success--in a word, outer America with inner America. Charlie attributes Humboldt's final explosion of madness and despair to his modernist education. Once you had read Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology." Aware that the plight of the twentieth-century artist in America is his plight as well, Charlie resolves to "interpret the good and the evil of Humboldt, understand his ruin, translate the sadness of his life, find out why such gifts produced such negligible results." His social critique produces a view of the modern world which has resulted in spiritual sloth, materialistic hedonism, and loss of the inner life. In Chicago, he observes, you could truly "examine the spirit under industrialism," in all its agony and nightmare. He concludes that he must emerge from his spirit's sleep and recover his Heraclitan powers in order to listen to the truest essence of things. Above all, he knows he must erect a giant buffer zone between himself and Chicago. This planet, he concludes, is "a thrilling but insufficiently humanized imitation of the platonic home-world." He must prove the equal sovereignty of the imagination with modern science so that its truths become powerful again. The external progression of the novel focuses on Charlie's plight as a sixty-year-old-writer who must now forgo dreaminess, sexual hubris, false art, and the lure of a media-oriented capitalist society. Come the conclusion of the novel, Charlie rejects his erotic obsessions, his high gratification levels, at the same time as he copes with the mutual betrayals in his relationship with Humboldt, family of childhood, and his business affairs. We last see him contemplating the miracle of the crocus he sees growing through the cracks of the hard city pavement, and realizing that it is but a small and beautiful reminder that much of what has eluded him spiritually, is still there to be discovered. 

During this period of time, Bellow registered in essay and fiction his final disapproval of Freud's notions on the unconscious and sought further understanding about meditative states and transcendental experience through his reading of Rudolph Steiner and Owen Barfield. He had begun his discussions on anthroposophy with Professor Le May, a trusted mentor, discussions which lasted until Le May's death in 1983. His relationship with the famous British anthroposophist, Barfield, seems to have been almost entirely one-sided. While Bellow sought understanding from Barfield, it seems that Barfield eschewed the mentor role and made at least two fairly public statements about how little Bellow's fiction moved or interested him. Nevertheless, Bellow had enrolled himself in the "theosophical kindergarten" in his attempts to penetrate the contemporary barriers to higher consciousness. 

Humboldt's Gift reflects these interests and is in part a serious religious discussion couched in a deflecting comic idiom. But is is also preoccupied with harsh social analysis much autobiography. In it he looks at everything he has lost in life or been accused of. As Miller points out, it was a case of "Vacate the personae." One of the most interesting and unremarked aspects of the novel is its careful juxtaposition of two symbolic and mutually exclusive gender constructs--an overweening "hypermasculinity" on the one hand, and an all but culturally eclipsed "poetic feminine" on the other. While the hypermasculine construct is elaborated through a rich taxonomy of destructive American male alter egos instrumental in Charlie's poetic failure, the "poetic feminine" construct is symbolized almost entirely in Jungian terms. The story becomes in part a parable about a capitalistic American culture in which hypermasculine striving for dominance, power, and self-aggrandizement has all but excluded love, the soul, beauty, and poetic visionary states. As such, it destroys men of feeling such as Poe, Humboldt, and Charlie. However, Bellow demonstrates through Charlie that this valuable dimension of human experience and vision can be re-glimpsed by deconstructing his own peculiarly American brand of hypermasculinity.