BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : ‘90s-Style ‘Zentrepreneurs’ and the Unbearable Lightness of Capitalism : THE HEART AROUSED: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America <i> by David Whyte</i> ; Doubleday $22.50, 304 pages

At long last, American business seems to have bid a not-so-fond farewell to Gordon Gekko, that embodiment of ‘80s capitalism, who proclaimed “Greed Is Good” in Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street.”

A recent spate of management books suggests a new breed of business people, the “zentrepreneur,” is storming the corporate citadel of the ‘90s.

Raised on the idealism of the ‘60s, disillusioned with the materialism of the ‘80s but sobered by the failure of socialism that has become so unmistakable in the ‘90s, these zentrepreneurs have been moved to concoct a kinder, gentler sort of capitalism.

Their leaders range from Mel and Patricia Ziegler--whose 1992 book, “The Republic of Tea,” described how these self-titled “Ministers of Leaves and Enchantment,” respectively, created a successful San Francisco tea company--to Vice President Gore. In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” Gore argued idealistically, if improbably, that it is profitable to bless the beasts and the children.

It is a bizarre marriage, capitalism and Zen, for the former is obsessed with doing and the latter with being. But in this elegantly written book, English-born poet David Whyte almost brings it off.

He writes not explicitly about Zen but about the Zen-like concepts of mostly Western poets.

The traditionally fractious relationship between poetry and business is perhaps best symbolized by the scroungy Elizabethan bard in Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando” who scoffs at a nobleman’s attempt to compose verse. Whyte, nevertheless, manages to find celebrations of the workaday world even in the writings of Bohemians and iconoclasts who have always regarded “company” as a four-letter word.

Whyte, who makes his own living teaching poetry to corporate America, flatters business people by rhetorically situating them in the “upper world . . . the material, light-filled portion of existence”; poets he consigns to “the dark and subterranean cave of the soul.”

There are many good reasons, of course, why American managers prefer to keep soulful feelings in caves and out of the office, and Whyte, to his credit, acknowledges some of them.

“The Koreans and the Japanese are not great readers of Jungian psychology and will have another product on the shelves before we have surfaced for air,” he writes. “The relief from other people’s emotional burdens in a professional environment can be refreshing.”

Whyte argues, however, that if managers expect their employees to “respond with personal artistry to the confusion of global market change,” then they simply cannot afford to keep the soul subterranean. They need its creativity and thus must attend to its fears and desires (e.g., the “unresolved parent-child relationships that play out in rigid company hierarchies”).

Still, Whyte’s understanding is limited by his apparent inexperience with the actual nature of office life. His description of how everyday tasks can be transcendent, for instance, is so romantic that one suspects he has not toiled much at those tasks:

“Lifting our fingers over the computer keyboard to write a memo, we unconsciously play out the continuing drama of universal existence. A small eddy in the vast river of events, our quickly written memo is a small perturbation on the edge of a vast system, about to change everything or nothing. Every action taken, from the moment we switch off the alarm clock in the morning to the way we write a line of poetry or design a product, has the potential to change the world.”

Similarly, Whyte’s tips on how we can work more soulfully do not acknowledge the compromises that are arguably necessary to help the corporate wheels turn smoothly. He glorifies the manager, for instance, who announces at a board meeting that the boss’s idea is a “zero” on a scale of 1 to 10. And he quotes Rilke: “Where I am folded in upon myself, there I am a lie.”

Like pop theologian Thomas Moore, whose generous blurbs adorn both the front and back covers of this book, Whyte situates soulful conflicts entirely within the realm of the individual, not between the individual and social forces like capitalism or companies. The “veritable San Andreas fault in the modern American psyche,” he writes, is between the power-loving “personality” and the experience-loving “soul.”

But given that human nature seems inclined to “be” in the present, while corporate nature seems compelled to “do” for the future, perhaps it would be more realistic to define that fault line as running between the power-loving company and the experience-loving person .