An Analysis of Jim Morrison’s Poetry

An Analysis of Jim Morrisons Poetry Through the Eyes of a Fan. James Douglas Morrisons poem was born disclose of a period of tumultuous loving and political change in Ameri female genital organ and macrocosm history. Besides Morrisons social and political perspective, his verse too speaks with an understanding of the being of literature, particularly of the traditions that shaped the poetry of his age. His poetry expresses his take in cognises, thoughts, development, and maturation as a poet from his m victimisations 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 to show Morrison as a good American poet, whose knead is worthy of serious consideration in intercourse to its place in the American literary tradition. By discussing the poetry in terms of Morrisons fascinates and give birth judgements, I will be adequate to show what distinguishes him as a significant American poet. In tramp to reveal him as having a cl archean defined ability as a poet, my focus will be on Morrisons own words and poetry. I will concentrate on his earlier crap to show the influence of Nietzsche and French poets such as artistic productionhur Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud and the effect they had on Morrisons poetry and style.Morrisons poetic style is characterised by kitschy ambiguity of compresseding which serves to express subconscious thought and feelinga runency now generally associated with the post-modern or avant garde. His poetic strength is that he creates poetry so unmatchabler pro pitch in its effect upon the commemorateer, 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 re principal(prenominal)s starchy in subject and smelling, he still manages to strain it his own in the way he adapts these influences to his style, experiences, and ideas.We would prognosticate to find remnants of quotes, stolen lines and ideas, in a lesser writer, but Morrison shows his strength as a poet by resisting plagiarism and blatant borrowing, in order to action originality in his own verse. As T. S. Eliot has said, Bad poets borrow, good poets steal. Morrisons poetry is very surrealistic at clock times, as well as passing symbolic there is a pervading whiz of the inconclusive, jumbled, and the blood-red an effect produced by startling juxtapositions of images and words. Morrisons poetry reveals a singular domain of a function a place populated by characters straight out f Morrisons circus of the mind, from the strange streets of Los Angeles boulevards and back alleys. Morrisons speech is a aboriginal tongue, and his eye is that of a fantastic American poet. He be enormouss to what poet and critic Jerome Rothenberg calls the American Prophecy . . . present in all that speaks to our sense of identity and our take on for re briskal. Rothenberg sees th is prophetic tradition as Affirming the oldest function of poetry, which is to interrupt the habits of ordinary instinct by way of more precise and highly charged uses of lyric and to provide unused tools for discovering the underlying relatedness of all life . . A redundant concern for the interplay of fiction and history runs through the whole of American literature. Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman aphorism the poets function in part as bring out the visionary meaning of our blend ins in relation to the time and place in which we live . . . we welcome taken this American emphasis on the relationship of myth and history, of poetry and life, as the key meaning of a prophetic native-born tradition. The lasting impression of Morrisons poems is that they fire to render the imagine or nightm ar of modern existence in terms of words and resource, quite bizarre and obscure, yet compelling at the same time.An important chance close to the body of his work and his commitment t o his particular style, whiz well-nigh aligned to Rothenbergs prophetic tradition, is that it is in the tradition of what some other poets of his time were writing. Morrisons other(a) 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 argon the foundation on which he develops his poetic style. on the whole the motifs, symbols, and imagery introduced in his number 1 collection of poems recur continuously end-to-end his later works. The Lords and The New Creatures was conceived as two separate books however, it was published as one book containing Morrisons 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 nones and prose poems while the s half, The New C reatures, is an assortment of poetry.The Lords is a motley work of ideas and prose, loosely held to stingher with motifs of death, cinema, and the re variant of mythical and theatrical theory. While originality have the appearance _or_ phantasys to be in short supply, and round-eyed idealism in abundance, it is interesting for the allusion to, and presentation of philosophical and aesthetic ideas, central to Morrisons poetry. Stylistically, The Lords reflects his propensity for dark imagery and self-mythology, which would later be a fundamental characteristic of his poetry and performance.The motifs that pervade all of his poetry stand up the city, sexuality, death, assassins, voyeurs, wanderers, deserts, shamanism, and so on. The autobiographic and historical references in the poems reflect the myth making process of crook fact into fiction the inner world of the psyche and its detections of surroundings, a mythical landscape of Morrisons mind. The poetry, however, has a strong sense of place the strong observational power of the astute outsider, works well in the invocations of strange border towns and locations. His vision of Los Angeles, or Lamerica, is profound in its focus and impressions.It is evening stranger because of the ambivalent nostalgia Morrison seems to hold for the place, where he had lived and performed with the Doors Los Angeles is a city spirit for a ritual to join its fragments. At first, for Morrison, it was musical theatre that would attempt to provide the ritual for the city, using his shaman principles to try to join its fragments, and start out his audience together. When that failed, and the summer of love and the notion of hippie solidarity had dissipated, he move to his poetry as the ritual that would piece together the fragments of his own experience.Like Eliots fragments shored against his ruins in The absquatulate Land, Morrisons words and poetry be the means by which he can make sense of his world and safety device against his aesthetic mortality. However, as always in his poems, there is a sense of cynicism, directed toward himself as well as the reader. Al roughly as if, his woeful and sacrifices, made in the scream of art and cultural freedom, were not for his own benefit but for the benefit of you, the reader spoken communication argon healing. Words got me the wound and will get me wellIf you believe it. This segment from the absurdly titled, bewail for the Death of my Cock, reflects Morrisons pessimism and poetic idealism. The sense of suffering expressed in this later poem is also found in his earlier work The Lords, in relation to the idea of sacrifice for the good of all What sacrifice, at what price can the city be born? Morrisons early awareness of fiats ills, and his benevolent sense of social responsibility, meant that he had a personally doomed and intense experience of America and its ideals.In particular, the westward Dream, as expressed in his apocalyptic invoc ation of a sturdy new world of dreamlike existence and ritual We are from the West. The world we suggest should be a new Wild West, a sensuous, diabolic world, strange, and haunting. With his own experience informing his work, Morrison begins The Lords by addressing the reader rhetorically, as if revealing some(prenominal) truth about modern existence. He introduces his analogy of a societys relation to place, in terms of a back. His vision of the city is one of a dystopian env pressmentit is an interpretation of the American condition and all modern civilisations.Morrison sees the city in modernist and symboliser terms the metropolis as a metaphorical reflection of society We all live in the city. The city forms often physically, but needfully psychically a circle. A Game. A ring of death with sex at its center. Drive toward outskirts of city suburbs. At the edge discover zones of educate vice and boredom, child prostitution. But in the grimy ring outright surrounding th e daylight business district exists the lone(prenominal) real conclave life of our mound, the only street life, night life. Diseased specimens in dollar mark hotels, low boarding houses, bars, pawn shops, urlesques and brothels, in dying arcades which never die, in streets and streets of all-night cinemas. Like Eliots invocation of the unreal city in The Waste Land, inherited from Baudelaires line about the swarming city, city full of dreams, where subtletys in broad daylight catch the walkers sleeve, there is a relation of person to place. Rimbauds perception of a city is more in line with Morrisons, when he cries O plaintive city O city now struck dumb, / Head and affectionateness stretched out in paleness / In endless doorways thrown ample by time / City the Dismal Past can only bless / Body galvanised for sufferings yet to come. Morrisons nearly socialist perception of American society and its negative effect upon culture and people, is one of the main concepts behind The Lords. He defines it as the feeling of powerlessness and helplessness that people have in the face of reality. They have no real visualise over events or their own lives. Something is controlling them. The closest they ever get is the television set. In creating this idea of the lords, it also came to reverse itself. Now to me, the lords mean something entirely different. I couldnt truly explain.Its like the opposite. someways the lords are a romantic race of people who have found a way to control their environment and their own lives. Theyre someways different from other people. The concept of the lords is a philosophical construct and a poetical device use to distinguish society as hierarchical. Morrisons idea of the lords can be related to Nietzsches view in The Will to Power (1967), of the Lords of the Earth that higher species which would climb aloft to new and impossible things, to a broader vision, and to its task on earth. The lords are the poets and artists the people who are revolutionaries, who seek to change the conformist culture in which they exist and direct society forward The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can only try to enslave others. But gradually, modified perceptions are being developed. The idea of the Lords is beginning to form in some minds. We should enlist them into bands of perceivers to tour the labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal appearances. The Lords have cryptic entrances, and they know disguises. But they give themselves outside in minor ways.Too some(prenominal) glint of light in the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a glance. The Lords appease us with images. They give us books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas. oddly the cinemas. Through art they confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted and indifferent. Door of passage to the other side, the soul frees itself in stride. In con trast to The Lords, Morrisons companion text edition The New Creatures, emphasises the bloodcurdling existence of other creatures who are submissive and roughly sub-species in their herd mentality and hellish existence.The violent imagery and surreal nature of the verse in The New Creatures, creates a disorganised and chaotic collection of poetry that seems to have no presum subject motive or logic. The content is highly subjective and foreign to closely readers some allusions and imagery are familiar in their generality, yet pointless in the apparent obscurity and juxtaposition. The poems personal content unfortunately makes about of The New Creatures unaccessible in their metaphorical and symbolic rendition of Morrisons psyche.In parts, Morrison evokes a tone and a cadence with the structure of word and image interplay similar in effectiveness to the lyrics he wrote for The Doors, some of which he actually performed Ensenada the dead stamp the dog crucifix Ghosts of the dead car insolate. Stop the car. Rain. Night. Feel. Most of the poems in The New Creatures seem strange and unrelated. Morrison gives the reader a clue to his mode of poetry, by his comments on art forms like film, especially when his poetry is so obviously cinematic in its style and effect.He states, with a reference to the modernist idea of art replicating pepper of consciousness, that he was interested in film because, to me, its the closest approximation in art that we have to the actual settle of consciousness. Many of Morrisons poems throughout his work are like film-clips in an avant-garde surrealist cinema. There is an intellectual, yet dreamy quality to his juxtaposition of ideas and insights about the world. Like the main proficiency of crowd manipulation he used on stage, Morrison uses the pause for great effect, yet not in the established grammatical or formal sense.Instead of a caesura, an ellipse, or a new line (all of which he also uses to effect), he uses an image a s a barrier to overcome, to be broken through Savage destiny naked as a jaybird girl, seen from behind, on a natural road Friends explore the labyrinth film young woman left on the desert A city gone mad w/ fever This pause, this break in string up or subject (in this case the metaphorical labyrinth) renders the verse as a staccato series of images rather than a progressive stream of ideas and words. In other words, the structure of the poem does try to replicate the irrational logic of stream of consciousness.Often these poems differentiate themselves from Morrisons more coherent pieces characteristically, they are like abstract paintings of violent and bizarre scenes, giving the reader a sense of the intoxicated state prevalent throughout much of Morrisons notorious, alcoholic and drug-abused, life. Reading some of Morrisons less adept poetry is like reading notes someone took while experiencing an LSD trip. This is what a gigantic percentage of them actually are according to legends of Morrisons excesses.The same elements trustingness in his more proficient poetry in intonation, profound visions, states of consciousness, and unreal images, all culminating in a unique contemplation of the world. His cinematic technique of image juxtaposition also emulates the effects of a psychedelic experience, which could also be interpreted as no less than an experience of Morrisons world and the 60s itself. Poetry, and his idea of the Poet, was the genesis for most of Morrisons experience. Poetry godly and vocalised his love of the cinematic visual, performance art, and musical lyricism.It also expressed his most profound thoughts, philosophies, and beliefs it was a means to relay his world, which was increasingly close to destruction. In The American Night, his poem An American Prayer echoes Frazers gold Bough along with the philosophies of Artaud and Nietzsche. Morrison appeals in his lament for understanding, for a consensus that technology and so-called prog ress is not necessarily better or more exciting than the mythically imbued past lets reinvent the gods, all the myths of the agesCelebrate symbols from deep elder forests . . . We have assembled privileged this superannuated and insane theatre To propagate our lust for life and run away the swarming wisdom of the streets . . . Im sick of dour faces Staring at me from the T. V. Tower. I want roses in My garden bower dig? In this sense, his attitude toward modernity is one of disdain, similar to Eliots perception of a defunct Western civilisation in The Waste Land. Consistently, throughout his poems, Morrison is anti-TV, almost as if he sees it as responsible for contemporary societys decline.It is paradoxical in that he vehemently supports a view of the world through the camera lens of the filmmakers eye. Apart from this cinematic cyclorama that carries through from his earliest work, the consistent use of dark and violent imagery, and the allusion to sublime philosophy and art, there is no one unifying aspect to his poetry. There is, however, an element of autobiography in the poems, subtly placed in the symbols and motifs associated with the lead singer of the Doors Snakeskin jacket Indian eyes Brilliant hairsbreadth He moves in disturbedNile Insect Air In The New Creatures, references bristle to his c pass aroundhes, Indian visions, Alexandrine hair, and shamanic dance moves it is a story about himself. We then are introduced to the poets perception of his reader You parade thru the soft summer We piquet your eager rifle decay Your wilderness Your teeming emptiness discolour forests on verge of light decline. More of your miracles More of your magic arms You, are the reader along for the journey we are the lords, the poet speaksenlightened ones, the ones who can see your wilderness . . America? He continues You are lost now, we are still the ones who can see what the reader cannot. Morrison invites us into his world, but the reader is always kept at arms length. In the next section of the poem, we are introduced to the state of the world and its inhabitants disease, despair, images of torture, and the unfortunate presence of death always lurking in the background. A strange exotic world is revealed, with rites and customs straight out of Sir James Frazers The Golden Bough Bitter grazing in sick pasturesAnimal sadness and the daybed Whipping. press curtains pried open. The elaborate sun implies dust, knives, voices. Call out of the Wilderness Call out of fever, receiving the wet dreams of an Aztec King. The elaborate sun is elaborate in its context the iron curtain forcibly opened reveals war, communism, Stalinist tyranny etc. The sun could be a reference to the east, the land of the rising sun (also the name of a city in Ohio) its place in the wilderness implies its ancient and customary qualities of meaning.The Aztec King brings a whole new dimension and deduction to the sun as the ancient Mayans used the blood of human s acrifices to lace the daily journey of the sun across the sky. The characters of the poems are creatures of a nightmarish world. It is only upon realising that the creatures are meant to be uswe modern humansthat the fragments of society, held up to us as a mirror of ourselves through the experience of the author, live on familiar.Robert Duncan, a poet from Morrisons era, in a passage reminiscent of Morrisons credo of wake up and the paradoxical consequence of his (Morrisons) beliefs, perhaps scoop sums up the poets meaning and reason for creating such a world It is in the dream itself that we seem entirely creatures, without imagination, as if moved by a plot or myth told by a story-teller who is not ourselves. Wandering and wondering in a foreign land or struggling in the meshes of a nightmare, we cannot escape the compelling terms of the dream unless we wake, anymore than we can escape the terms of our living reality unless we die.Later in his life, as a more mature and seriou s writer, Morrison attempted to force out from his own living reality, he had become very aware of the naivety of his early work. He reflects on the significance of some of his early ideas and acknowledges the limits of his experience and youthful literary talents in terms of an expression of his life, art, and as a prophetic poet I deliberate in art, but especially in films, people are trying to confirm their own existence. Somehow things seem more real if they an be photographed and you can create a semblance of life on the screen. But those little aphorisms that make up most of The Lords if I could have said it any other way, I would have. They tend to be mulled over. I take a few seriously. I did most of that book when I was at the film school at UCLA. It was really a thesis on film esthetics. I wasnt able to make films then, so all I was able to do was think about them and write about them, and it probably reflects a lot of that.A lot of passages in it for example about sh amanism turned out to be very prophetic several years later because I had no idea when I was writing that, that Id be doing scarce that. The motif of the city in Morrisons poetry is as surrealistic as it is symbolic in the strange juxtapositions of vivid imagery, symbol, and metaphors of human consciousness. The truth is, one can never truly understand the mind of the American Poet. We are here, humbled by grandeur of his work, basking in the shadow of a seminal mind we cannot comprehend.I have based my lifes work off the poetry this one man has sent left behind, and here is my humble attempt to make a third person understand, not the poetry, but what I took away from it. I have reached a point in life where I feel the need to broaden my horizons, to move on from my never expiry obsession with Morrison and his words, so I write these words not to have them read or heard, but as a rite of passage. good-bye Jim Morrison, and thank you for every thing. I shall forever be time lag at the harbor for the one day when the Crystal Ship comes in. Forever waiting for one last word to the world, from Mister Mojo Rising.