World Literature

The poet who seems to have had the largest role in determining Cohen’s decision to practice that art was the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, whom Cohen first read as teenager. Cohen’s song “Take This Waltz” is a translation of one of Lorca’s poems, and Cohen named his daughter Lorca. Another influence was the thirteenth-century Persian poet, Rumi, whom Cohen called “probably the greatest ascetic religious poet – in the same league as King David.” When Cohen studied briefly at Columbia University, he encountered the Beat movement, which influenced him in a number of ways, though it had little impact on the form of his poems. His writing always had a broad range of reference, from the Bible and ancient mythologies to modernism and postmodernism. His novel Beautiful Losers is reckoned a manifestation of international postmodernism, and, if Cohen’s first literary contexts were Montreal and Canada, his songs and records have had a large international audience. This chapter moves Cohen from a Canadian to a more global context, exploring the cosmopolitan origins of his work.