Hip-hop savant Aesop Rock claims to have “never wrote or read poetry that much” while growing up. You’d never know it from “The Living Human Curiousity Sideshow,” an 87-page booklet distributed with his recent EP “Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives,” compiling all of the acclaimed underground rapper’s (neé Ian Bavitz) lyrics since his 1999 album, “Float.”

Aesop’s gravel-voiced verses abound with extended metaphors, complex rhyme schemes, and passages that just plain don’t make sense, leading critic after critic to bring “the poetry question” forward in discussion of his artistic output.

Aesop contends that calling rap a “poem on a beat ... is pretty valid,” and that the many parallels between the two forms are “not a coincidence.” But he also stresses that “overinterpretation happens a lot” when critics try to analyze his convoluted flow, probably because his work is “not as linear” as their preconceptions of rap allow. “You get used to it,” he sighs, with the seemingly unperturbed air of the superscrutinized artist.

While his ambivalence is probably genuine, it’s unclear if an art form has ever expressed as burning a desire to be taken seriously as contemporary underground hip-hop. “The Living Human Curiousity Sideshow” forms part of a larger trend of MCs including unpunctuated, vaguely cummings-esque lyrics in photocopy-chic booklets.

Spoken word posterboy Saul Williams has published three volumes of poetry, when not inviting “99 Problems” producer Rick Rubin to lay the beats down on his hip-hop records. DJ Spooky, a Bowdoin graduate with a double major in French and philosophy, who performed at Sanders Theatre in March, weaves webs of aural, visual, and textual references ranging from Derrida to De La Soul.

This discourse between hip-hop and academia is starting to flow both ways. Courses like Literature and Arts A-86, “American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac” pack lecture halls at Harvard. After reading Aesop’s lyric “the villain of my Kabuki hologram cuz I hobble with hollow hands” (from the titular track of 1999’s “Float”), an enthusiastic Professor of English and American Literature and Language Gordon L. Teskey felt compelled to mention that “a good deal of English verse of the sixteenth century, before the emergence of iambic pentameter in the theatre, sounded like that: longer lines, lots of alliteration, a basically oral style sometimes called “tumbling measure.”

Not to be interpretatively outdone, John P. Marquand Professor of English Peter Sacks noted in an email that “there’s clearly an impressive and exuberant sensibility at work in the texture, verbal energy” in the lyrics to “Float.” He particularly admired Aesop’s impressive “range of allusion,” with its “blend of desperation and exhilaration, free play and constrained need—e.g., to float rather than drown.”

Tumbling measure? Free play and constrained need? Has Aesop penetrated the formidable defenses of the ivory tower out of a conscious effort to write “poetically”?

When pressed for musical and lyrical influences, Aesop doesn’t spout off references to Yeats or Ashbery, but instead constructs a veritable Who’s Who of classic rap lyricists, including Slick Rick, Ghostface Killah, and his mentor El-P. Instead of spending hours on end fine-tuning his rhyme scheme to match some stifled polyameter, Aesop’s main concern has always been to find “something I can work with, [...] then to assemble it over a beat.”

FABLED LYRICISTS

Complete poetic abstraction is still somewhat of a rarity in the hip-hop world, perhaps because only a few of the rappers working at these boundaries of lyrical representation have been able to achieve some modicum of national visibility. Some stars of this subset include much of the roster of Aesop’s home label Definitive Jux (Cannibal Ox, El-P, Mr. Lif), shapeshifting scene veteran Daniel Dumile (MF Doom to most), and Anticon Records’ obscurantist crew (Sole, Dose One, Sage Francis).

Also, reports of the Benz/backpack dichotomy between mainstream and underground rap that Kanye West claims to have transcended seem to have been greatly exaggerated. Hip-hop legends like Wu-Tang Clan, Rakim, Nas and Notorious B.I.G. have been weaving abstract rhymes into their oeuvres for years (albeit less pretentiously), along with left-field heroes like De La Soul, 3rd Bass and the Native Tongues Posse (Q-Tip’s nickname is even “the Abstract”).

Lyrical gems like Nas’ 1994 assertion that “sleep is the cousin of death” provide ample evidence for Teskey’s claim that “if you read some of Finnegans Wake...you’ll see some remarkable similarities to rap lyrics.”

Aesop grants that the vast majority of rap these days, regardless of its visceral appeal, is still lyrically a “glorified way of saying ‘bitches ain’t shit.’” Battle raps and posse tracks often serve to pad out “albums” lacking any unified theme, even in the “underground” scene in which he operates. An inextricable part of Aesop’s appeal is the relative lack of such pseudo-macho posturing in his work; in his own words, he doesn’t want to spend his “15 minutes of fame shitting on someone.”

But just as turn-of-the-century realist social literature had its Joyces and Faulkners to smash the illusion of representation with their shapeshifting prose, and the fiery politicized strains of the Dead Kennedys’ “Fresh Fruit for Rotting