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Authors: Ira B. Nadel
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and desire emerge as the dominant themes, united by an absorption in myth and integrated with religious sensuality.
A prose statement dated December 27, 1956, written during his year at Columbia, contains Cohen’s explanation of the importance of myth in his work. He begins with a declaration:
I want to continue experimenting with the myth applying it to contemporary life, and isolating it in contemporary experience, thus making new myths and modifying old ones. I want to put mythic time into my poems, so they can be identified with every true fable ever sung, and still be concerned with our own time, and the poems hanging in our own skies.
Cohen cites marriage and adultery as major themes that he will likely explore and then goes on to name poems that illustrate how myth can control poetic image and development. The poems deal exclusively with betrayal or adultery, his third example being the most self-defining, since it narrates the betrayal of the speaker. It reads in part:
I know all about passion and honour
but unfortunately this had really nothing to do with either;
oh there was passion I’m only too sure
and even a little honour
but the important thing was to cuckold Leonard Cohen.
Enlarging his sense of myth is his belief that what he does is linked to the folk song. His ballads, Cohen once explained, “strive for folk-song simplicity and the fable’s intensity.”
Cohen’s interest in myth coincided with a shift in literary studies, summarized by the work of the Canadian critic Northrop Frye. In 1957, the year after
Let Us Compare Mythologies
, Frye published his encyclopedic treatment of myth and literature,
Anatomy of Criticism
, initiating a new paradigm for the study of literature via archetypes. Frye reviewed Cohen’s first book in the
University of Toronto Quarterly
, providing restrained praise and acknowledgment of a minor talent. During this period, Canadian writers like James Reaney, Eli Mandel, and JayMacpherson were also turning to myth as a narrative device. Cohen’s book became part of the unconscious but unified development of mythopoetic studies that was evolving in Canada.
Let Us Compare Mythologies
contains several other themes that would inform Cohen’s later poetry: history, especially related to Jewish persecution, and the Holocaust; sexuality and attraction to women; lyrical sensuality; anger; cultural stereotypes; religion; and frustration with art or history as a means of solving personal crises. It is a young poet’s work designed to shock as well as excite (“The moon dangling wet like a half-plucked eye.”) One sees his early use of poetry as a form of prayer and the role of the poet as a sacred voice. And it exhibits confidence, demonstrating what Layton said was essential for a young poet: arrogance and inexperience. When asked in 1994 about the quality of his work in those days, Cohen quipped, “It’s been downhill ever since. Those early poems are pretty good.” Cohen had no strategy for becoming a public figure like Layton. “Mostly what I was trying to do was get a date. That was the most urgent element in my life.”
Women were becoming a dominant interest at this time, as an essay from the mid-fifties confirms. The topic was breasts, or as he preferred, “tits,” a word he did not use carelessly: “Breasts, in my mind at least, divide, they turn the mind one way and then another.” The terminology was significant: “bosom” belonged to the world of feminine hygiene. “Women who have popularity problems talk about their bosoms,” he writes. Other terms seem too flippant, “so back to tits which are nothing more than what they are, human and real, the form, the swell, the rosy corrugated nipples all carried plainly in the sound of the word.” One particular girl possessed “magic tits” which enraptured him, although he tries to explain that he is not a breast man. The tits of this particular woman deserved a poem, Cohen felt, but who would write
A prose statement dated December 27, 1956, written during his year at Columbia, contains Cohen’s explanation of the importance of myth in his work. He begins with a declaration:
I want to continue experimenting with the myth applying it to contemporary life, and isolating it in contemporary experience, thus making new myths and modifying old ones. I want to put mythic time into my poems, so they can be identified with every true fable ever sung, and still be concerned with our own time, and the poems hanging in our own skies.
Cohen cites marriage and adultery as major themes that he will likely explore and then goes on to name poems that illustrate how myth can control poetic image and development. The poems deal exclusively with betrayal or adultery, his third example being the most self-defining, since it narrates the betrayal of the speaker. It reads in part:
I know all about passion and honour
but unfortunately this had really nothing to do with either;
oh there was passion I’m only too sure
and even a little honour
but the important thing was to cuckold Leonard Cohen.
Enlarging his sense of myth is his belief that what he does is linked to the folk song. His ballads, Cohen once explained, “strive for folk-song simplicity and the fable’s intensity.”
Cohen’s interest in myth coincided with a shift in literary studies, summarized by the work of the Canadian critic Northrop Frye. In 1957, the year after
Let Us Compare Mythologies
, Frye published his encyclopedic treatment of myth and literature,
Anatomy of Criticism
, initiating a new paradigm for the study of literature via archetypes. Frye reviewed Cohen’s first book in the
University of Toronto Quarterly
, providing restrained praise and acknowledgment of a minor talent. During this period, Canadian writers like James Reaney, Eli Mandel, and JayMacpherson were also turning to myth as a narrative device. Cohen’s book became part of the unconscious but unified development of mythopoetic studies that was evolving in Canada.
Let Us Compare Mythologies
contains several other themes that would inform Cohen’s later poetry: history, especially related to Jewish persecution, and the Holocaust; sexuality and attraction to women; lyrical sensuality; anger; cultural stereotypes; religion; and frustration with art or history as a means of solving personal crises. It is a young poet’s work designed to shock as well as excite (“The moon dangling wet like a half-plucked eye.”) One sees his early use of poetry as a form of prayer and the role of the poet as a sacred voice. And it exhibits confidence, demonstrating what Layton said was essential for a young poet: arrogance and inexperience. When asked in 1994 about the quality of his work in those days, Cohen quipped, “It’s been downhill ever since. Those early poems are pretty good.” Cohen had no strategy for becoming a public figure like Layton. “Mostly what I was trying to do was get a date. That was the most urgent element in my life.”
Women were becoming a dominant interest at this time, as an essay from the mid-fifties confirms. The topic was breasts, or as he preferred, “tits,” a word he did not use carelessly: “Breasts, in my mind at least, divide, they turn the mind one way and then another.” The terminology was significant: “bosom” belonged to the world of feminine hygiene. “Women who have popularity problems talk about their bosoms,” he writes. Other terms seem too flippant, “so back to tits which are nothing more than what they are, human and real, the form, the swell, the rosy corrugated nipples all carried plainly in the sound of the word.” One particular girl possessed “magic tits” which enraptured him, although he tries to explain that he is not a breast man. The tits of this particular woman deserved a poem, Cohen felt, but who would write
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