Like an Angel

The last years of the Grateful Dead’s career saw fewer than the usual number of original compositions, but the lyricists who worked with the band were far from inactive. Robert Hunter, in particular, increasingly published his poetry and other writings in little magazines, saw those works collected in books issued by independent and major publishing houses, and, by the late 1990s, experimented with email and web pages as publication outlets. Chapter 5 gives this side of the Grateful Dead’s project its due by offering the first extended scholarly treatment of Hunter’s poetry. That poetry was shaped especially by the work of Modernist writers, and a portion of this chapter turns to the place of Finnegans Wake in the lyrics of the Grateful Dead. Even more attention is paid to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, whose Duino Elegies were translated by Hunter and left a strong mark on his poetry.