Jim Morrison: A ‘Serious’ Poet?
by grantw71 July 12, 2003 7:48 pm LA BOHEME, MUSIC
"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
James Douglas Morrison's poetry was born out of a period of tumultuous social and political change in American and world history. Besides Morrison's social and political perspective, his verse also speaks with an understanding of the world of literature, especially of the traditions that shaped the poetry of his age. His poetry also expresses his own experiences, thoughts, development, and maturation as a poet--from his musings on film at UCLA in The Lords and The New Creatures, to his final poems in Wilderness and The American Night. It is my intention in this essay to show Morrison as a serious American poet, whose work is worthy of serious consideration in relation to its place in the American literary tradition. By discussing the poetry in terms of Morrison's influences and own ideas, I will be able to show what distinguishes him as a significant American poet. In order to reveal him as having a clearly-defined ability as a poet, my focus will be on Morrison's own words and poetry. I will concentrate on his earlier work to show the influence of Nietzsche and French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud and the effect they had on Morrison's poetry and style.
Morrison's poetic style is characterized by contrived ambiguity of meaning which serves to express subconscious thought and feeling--a tendency now generally associated with the postmodern or avant garde. His poetic strength is that he creates poetry quite profound in its effect upon the reader, by using vividly evocative words and images in his poems. While it is obvious that Morrison has read writers that influence his work, and their influence remains strong in subject and tone, he still manages to make it his own in the way he adapts these influences to his style, experiences, and ideas. We would expect to find remnants of quotes, stolen lines and ideas, in a lesser writer, but Morrison shows his strength as a poet by resisting plagiarism in order to achieve originality in his own verse. As T. S. Eliot has said, "Bad poets borrow, good poets steal."
Morrison's poetry is very surreal at times, as well as highly symbolic--there is a pervading sense of the irrational, chaotic, and the violent; an effect produced by startling juxtapositions of images and words. Morrison's poetry reveals a strange world--a place peopled by characters straight out of Morrison's circus of the mind, from the strange streets of Los Angeles boulevards and back alleys. Morrison's speech is a native tongue, and his eye is that of a visionary American poet. He belongs to what poet and critic Jerome Rothenberg calls the "American Prophecy . . . present in all that speaks to our sense of 'identity' and our need for renewal." Rothenberg sees this prophetic tradition as "affirming the oldest function of poetry, which is to interrupt the habits of ordinary consciousness by means of more precise and highly charged uses of language and to provide new tools for discovering the underlying relatedness of all life . . . A special concern for the interplay of myth and history runs through the whole of American literature. Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman saw the poet's function in part as revealing the visionary meaning of our lives in relation to the time and place in which we live . . . we have taken this American emphasis on the relationship of myth and history, of poetry and life, as the central meaning of a 'prophetic' native tradition."
The lasting impression of Morrison's poems is that they attempt to render the dream or nightmare of modern existence in terms of words and imagery, quite bizarre and obscure, yet compelling at the same time. An important aspect about the body of his work and his commitment to his particular style, one closely aligned to Rothenberg's prophetic tradition, is that it is in the tradition of what other poets of his time were writing.
Critiquing the Myth of Morrison
In 1994, Professor of French Literature at Duke University, Wallace Fowlie, published the first scholarly study of the poetry of the charismatic lead singer of the sixties rock band The Doors. The book was titled Rimbaud & Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet, and as suggested by the title, it is a comparative study of the lives and work of Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. The fact that Morrison had written to Fowlie, thanking him for his 1966 translation, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, proved the starting point for Fowlie's comparison between the two poets. Despite Fowlie's apparent good intentions, his knowledge of Rimbaud's work and his understanding of French symbolism far outweigh any of the observations he makes about Morrison's poetry. Perhaps the most insightful point he makes is when he labels Morrison "Kouros," the Greek word for "a youth attractive to men and women . . .[a word used] At times in praise of his beauty. At other times it is hurled almost as a curse at those youths who insolently torment older people."
After inadvertently making his own contribution to the Morrison myth by stereotyping him as Kouros, Fowlie goes on to disclaim his own observation by stating that "[t]his name I suggest as representative of the non-hypocritical innocence of Jim when he was not aware of the power of his appearance and his personality." When was Morrison ever not aware of his appearance and his personality? Pre-teens? This is a typical example of Fowlie's misunderstanding of Morrison's character and is what informs most of his discussion of Morrison's poetry. Consequently, Fowlie only ever illuminates the obvious in the poems, although he does make solid connections between some of Morrison's poems and their allusion to and the influence of Rimbaud.
Fowlie has written a perceptive analysis of Rimbaud's poetry and the poet's role as rebel, yet the same observations are in his 1946 study, Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood. Again, by concentrating on the myth of Morrison, as he does successfully with Rimbaud, Fowlie ignores the literary qualities of the poetry. Like most people that encountered Morrison, either through books or in person, Fowlie never seems to get past the myth. In view of this unfortunate aspect of his discussion of Morrison's poetry, his approach is neither scholarly nor enlightening. However, what Fowlie does provide is a superficial guide to those wanting to pursue certain points, such as the influence of Nietzsche, Artaud, Rimbaud and the Beats on Morrison's own writing.
Most literature on Morrison is predominantly biographical, preferring to regurgitate the myth and scandal surrounding his life and times, rather than give his art any serious consideration. Despite interest, both negative and positive, his writing has not been comprehensively analyzed in the context of his life and culture. Nor has it been discussed in terms of its merits (and failings), or its place in the ranks of American literature, and the reasons for this are twofold. First, Morrison's verse is obscure, highly subjective and at times obscene or grotesque in imagery and speech, as in "An American Prayer" from The American Night:
To this point, Morrison's reputation precedes any serious literary analysis of the work. Despite his failings as a human and as a poet, he has left behind some valuable and important examples of his poetic talent that deserve serious analysis. This discussion will focus primarily on Morrison's earliest work and the display of ideas, influences, and style that evolved into his own poetic voice. It is my belief in the strengths and significance of Morrison's poetry, which has led me to situate him as a poet in the American literary tradition.
Motivation & Motif
Morrison's early experiments with poetry and prose, written between 1964-69, depict--in the language of an intellectually ambitious film student--the strong influence of people such as Nietzsche and Artaud, and his ideas on aesthetics, philosophy, life, and film in particular. His early writings are the foundation on which he develops his poetical style. All the motifs, symbols, and imagery introduced in his first collection of poems recur continuously throughout his later works. The Lords and The New Creatures was conceived as two separate books; however, it was published as one book containing Morrison's ideas and poetry. Essentially, it is a forum for the fleshing out of style. The first half of the book The Lords: Notes on Vision, is a collection of notes and prose poems; while the second half, The New Creatures, is an assortment of poetry.
The Lords is a motley work of ideas and prose, loosely held together with motifs of death, cinema, and the reinterpretation of mythical and theatrical theory. While originality seems to be in short supply, and na
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
James Douglas Morrison's poetry was born out of a period of tumultuous social and political change in American and world history. Besides Morrison's social and political perspective, his verse also speaks with an understanding of the world of literature, especially of the traditions that shaped the poetry of his age. His poetry also expresses his own experiences, thoughts, development, and maturation as a poet--from his musings on film at UCLA in The Lords and The New Creatures, to his final poems in Wilderness and The American Night. It is my intention in this essay to show Morrison as a serious American poet, whose work is worthy of serious consideration in relation to its place in the American literary tradition. By discussing the poetry in terms of Morrison's influences and own ideas, I will be able to show what distinguishes him as a significant American poet. In order to reveal him as having a clearly-defined ability as a poet, my focus will be on Morrison's own words and poetry. I will concentrate on his earlier work to show the influence of Nietzsche and French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud and the effect they had on Morrison's poetry and style.
Morrison's poetic style is characterized by contrived ambiguity of meaning which serves to express subconscious thought and feeling--a tendency now generally associated with the postmodern or avant garde. His poetic strength is that he creates poetry quite profound in its effect upon the reader, by using vividly evocative words and images in his poems. While it is obvious that Morrison has read writers that influence his work, and their influence remains strong in subject and tone, he still manages to make it his own in the way he adapts these influences to his style, experiences, and ideas. We would expect to find remnants of quotes, stolen lines and ideas, in a lesser writer, but Morrison shows his strength as a poet by resisting plagiarism in order to achieve originality in his own verse. As T. S. Eliot has said, "Bad poets borrow, good poets steal."
Morrison's poetry is very surreal at times, as well as highly symbolic--there is a pervading sense of the irrational, chaotic, and the violent; an effect produced by startling juxtapositions of images and words. Morrison's poetry reveals a strange world--a place peopled by characters straight out of Morrison's circus of the mind, from the strange streets of Los Angeles boulevards and back alleys. Morrison's speech is a native tongue, and his eye is that of a visionary American poet. He belongs to what poet and critic Jerome Rothenberg calls the "American Prophecy . . . present in all that speaks to our sense of 'identity' and our need for renewal." Rothenberg sees this prophetic tradition as "affirming the oldest function of poetry, which is to interrupt the habits of ordinary consciousness by means of more precise and highly charged uses of language and to provide new tools for discovering the underlying relatedness of all life . . . A special concern for the interplay of myth and history runs through the whole of American literature. Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman saw the poet's function in part as revealing the visionary meaning of our lives in relation to the time and place in which we live . . . we have taken this American emphasis on the relationship of myth and history, of poetry and life, as the central meaning of a 'prophetic' native tradition."
The lasting impression of Morrison's poems is that they attempt to render the dream or nightmare of modern existence in terms of words and imagery, quite bizarre and obscure, yet compelling at the same time. An important aspect about the body of his work and his commitment to his particular style, one closely aligned to Rothenberg's prophetic tradition, is that it is in the tradition of what other poets of his time were writing.
In 1994, Professor of French Literature at Duke University, Wallace Fowlie, published the first scholarly study of the poetry of the charismatic lead singer of the sixties rock band The Doors. The book was titled Rimbaud & Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet, and as suggested by the title, it is a comparative study of the lives and work of Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. The fact that Morrison had written to Fowlie, thanking him for his 1966 translation, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, proved the starting point for Fowlie's comparison between the two poets. Despite Fowlie's apparent good intentions, his knowledge of Rimbaud's work and his understanding of French symbolism far outweigh any of the observations he makes about Morrison's poetry. Perhaps the most insightful point he makes is when he labels Morrison "Kouros," the Greek word for "a youth attractive to men and women . . .[a word used] At times in praise of his beauty. At other times it is hurled almost as a curse at those youths who insolently torment older people."
After inadvertently making his own contribution to the Morrison myth by stereotyping him as Kouros, Fowlie goes on to disclaim his own observation by stating that "[t]his name I suggest as representative of the non-hypocritical innocence of Jim when he was not aware of the power of his appearance and his personality." When was Morrison ever not aware of his appearance and his personality? Pre-teens? This is a typical example of Fowlie's misunderstanding of Morrison's character and is what informs most of his discussion of Morrison's poetry. Consequently, Fowlie only ever illuminates the obvious in the poems, although he does make solid connections between some of Morrison's poems and their allusion to and the influence of Rimbaud.
Fowlie has written a perceptive analysis of Rimbaud's poetry and the poet's role as rebel, yet the same observations are in his 1946 study, Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood. Again, by concentrating on the myth of Morrison, as he does successfully with Rimbaud, Fowlie ignores the literary qualities of the poetry. Like most people that encountered Morrison, either through books or in person, Fowlie never seems to get past the myth. In view of this unfortunate aspect of his discussion of Morrison's poetry, his approach is neither scholarly nor enlightening. However, what Fowlie does provide is a superficial guide to those wanting to pursue certain points, such as the influence of Nietzsche, Artaud, Rimbaud and the Beats on Morrison's own writing.
Most literature on Morrison is predominantly biographical, preferring to regurgitate the myth and scandal surrounding his life and times, rather than give his art any serious consideration. Despite interest, both negative and positive, his writing has not been comprehensively analyzed in the context of his life and culture. Nor has it been discussed in terms of its merits (and failings), or its place in the ranks of American literature, and the reasons for this are twofold. First, Morrison's verse is obscure, highly subjective and at times obscene or grotesque in imagery and speech, as in "An American Prayer" from The American Night:
Cling to cunts & cocksSecondly, the myth tends to impede any progress past itself--the romantic idea of Morrison as poet-performer is preferable to the critics than any serious attempt to actually understand or analyze the poetry itself. For example, Fowlie's judgement of Morrison's life pigeonholes him in terms of the poetry; he cannot separate Morrison's poetry from the "persona [which] had everythi ng to do with the principle of Dionysus."
of despair
We got our final vision
by clap
Columbus' groin got
filled w/ green death
(I touched her thigh
& death smiled)
To this point, Morrison's reputation precedes any serious literary analysis of the work. Despite his failings as a human and as a poet, he has left behind some valuable and important examples of his poetic talent that deserve serious analysis. This discussion will focus primarily on Morrison's earliest work and the display of ideas, influences, and style that evolved into his own poetic voice. It is my belief in the strengths and significance of Morrison's poetry, which has led me to situate him as a poet in the American literary tradition.
Morrison's early experiments with poetry and prose, written between 1964-69, depict--in the language of an intellectually ambitious film student--the strong influence of people such as Nietzsche and Artaud, and his ideas on aesthetics, philosophy, life, and film in particular. His early writings are the foundation on which he develops his poetical style. All the motifs, symbols, and imagery introduced in his first collection of poems recur continuously throughout his later works. The Lords and The New Creatures was conceived as two separate books; however, it was published as one book containing Morrison's ideas and poetry. Essentially, it is a forum for the fleshing out of style. The first half of the book The Lords: Notes on Vision, is a collection of notes and prose poems; while the second half, The New Creatures, is an assortment of poetry.
The Lords is a motley work of ideas and prose, loosely held together with motifs of death, cinema, and the reinterpretation of mythical and theatrical theory. While originality seems to be in short supply, and na
Dear grantw71,
I enjoyed reading your article. You have delved into Morrison’s intellect and his ability as an author. My comment is that though your views are benign you don’t pay sufficient credit. He outshone any other poet of his age and this is what time will tell…”inward click and sure”. You are on the threshold of the immense Morrison literary industry…you know, don’t you, Shakespeare had to die before he was honoured as a literary figure, but those who enjoyed his plays while he lived were in awe of him, but then who could have known..who had sufficient intellect to understand his intellect… he just looked like another flawed human being…but now, with the intellect and knowledge that the passage of time bestows on humanity we realise that no-one of his time truly realised who stood before them when he tramped the stage as the ghost or other minor roles in his own plays. So it is with James Douglas Morrison. One thing is clear though, both Shakespeare and Morrison knew of their own genius. It is pointless to compare either of them with a buffoon like T.S. Elliot, but Rimbaud and Blake are fair comparisons. An eternity was buried at Pere Lachaise. All the best.
Stephen Loomes
Australia
In the late sixties I was in my teens, and the music played on radio here in Australia back then was pretty average. I still recall hearing Bob Dylan singing a six minute song, “Like a Rolling Stone” and it was fantastic, not just that it was iconoclastically breaking the mould of the 2 minute 40 second rock song, but the lyrics were so poetic, and he wrote them. Then in 1967 ( I think it was) I heard the Doors first album and here was another poet. It seemed like a Renaissance when all the greatest minds suddenly diverted from law, politics, advertising or wherever else they would have gone, and got into rock and roll, poetry and conscioiusness expansion. The world lives on ideas, some good, some bad. Jesus, Mohammed, Zarathustra, the whole lot had ideas that have spiralled down through time dragging in millions. With the artists of the sixties, there was no “holy book” but there were albums with music and lyrics. In Morrison’s case, there were his poetry books. The ideas of Morrison are proving to be so powerful, and as with Shakespeare and Dylan, they will move from popular culture into the mainstream where academics will obtain their doctorates dissecting their works. Beyond the dessicated world of academia, many artists have modelled themselves on people like Dylan and Morrison. I believe Jim also took literature into a modern age and we all know Jim loved the English language and words, and word play, witness the anagram on his own name, Mr. Mojo Risin. I love Dylan’s rhymes, particularly the genius of a song like “It’s Alright Ma I’m Only Bleeding” but without a competitive comparison, Morrison used a freer verse in his poetry not so tied to the rhyming couplets of Bob “darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon, the hand-made blade, the child’s balloon, to understand you know to soon, there is no sense in trying.” Jim could do that too, as in “there will never be another one like you, there will never be another one who can do the things you do, (from Shaman’s Blues). However, Jim’s progression beyond the rhyming couplets which are so appropriate for songs was a staggeringly meaningful abstraction without rhyme; for example, on p. 138 of his poetry book, The Lords and the New Creatures, when describing an helicopter flying over the war-fields in IndoChina and macerating the soldiers he writes: “the chopper blazed over, inward click and sure, blasted matter, made the time bombs free of leprous lands, spotted with hunger and clinging to law.”
The beauty of his use of words, “inward click and sure” conjuring the pilot’s thumb on the knob on the joystick activating a cannon blasting hundreds of bullets a minute over an asian paddy field. His ironic reference to the might, power (shock and awe) of the U.S. military machine (which he had first hand knowledge about from visits to the war machine in which his Dad worked) as being “leprous lands, spotted with hunger and clinging to law (ie., for God and country).
His vision on each of us here on earth stripped to our most selfish mamallian form, on p., 132. ” I can’t believe this is happening, I can’t believe all these people, are sniffing each other, & backing away, teeth grinning, hair raised, growling, here in the slaughtered wind.”
It was a dark vision in part, but it provided a reality that still informs the thinking of many of us. On p.119, “Jackal, we sniff the survivors of caravans. We reap bloody crops on war fields. No meat of any corpse deprives our lean bellies. Hunger drives us on scented winds. Stranger, traveler, peer into our eyes & translate the horrible barking of ancient dogs.” These messages have lost no meaning, and in fact with the belligerence of the west in their wars on terror, and the madness of the islamic fascists they eloquently portrayed the future. He was however, in my view, a humble loving person who could portray his horror of the rape of a beautiful planet. “What have they done to the Earth? What have they done to our fair Sister, ravaged and plundered,ripped her and bit her, stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn, tied her with fences, and, dragged her down.” The butterfly screams. “We want the world and we want it now.” As he said, p.188 of Wilderness, “To have just been born , for beauty & see sadness, What is this frail sickness?” To finish, p.161 of Wilderness, “The War is over there, I am neither doctor nor saint, Christ or soldier, Now, friends, don’t look at me sadly ranting like some incomprehensible child. I know by my breath of what I speak, & what I’ve seen needs telling.” So Jim’s mortal remains lie at rest in Pere Lachaise but this spirit of inquiry and love of life live on.As he said, p.197 of Wilderness, “The Endless quest, a vigil of watchtowers and fortresses against the sea and time. Have they won? Perhaps. They still stand and in, their silent rooms still wander, the souls of the dead, who keep their watch on the living. Soon enough we shall join them. Soon enough we shall walk the walls of time. We shall miss nothing except each other.”
who wrote this please I need to know because i need it for an essay
Hi
I wrote it - you can see the full text here: http://www.williamcook.net.
Will