An Analysis of Jim Morrison’s Poetry

An Analysis of Jim Morrisons meter Through the Eyes of a Fan. jam Douglas Morrisons numbers was innate(p) extinct of a period of tumultuous societal and political tilt in Ameri wad and world hi apologue. Besides Morrisons companionable and political perspective, his verse excessively speaks with an close of the world of literature, especi wholly(prenominal)y of the traditions that shaped the rhyme of his age. His song expresses his throw experiences, thoughts, development, and maturation as a poet from his musings on put d apply got at UCLA in The Lords and The fresh Creatures, to his final poems in Wilderness and The Ameri crumb Night.It is my intention to ground Morrison as a serious American poet, whose over conk is worthy of serious precondition in apprisal to its role in the American literary tradition. By discussing the verse personal line of credit in footing of Morrisons deviates and profess ideas, I forget be competent to show what distinguishe s him as a meaning(a) American poet. In order to say him as having a clearly specify ability as a poet, my commission will be on Morrisons profess words and poem. I will concentrate on his earlier work to show the influence of Nietzsche and French poets such(prenominal) as Arthur Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud and the effect they had on Morrisons poe sift and path.Morrisons poetical style is characterised by contrived ambiguity of meaning which serves to express subconscious thought and aromaa tendency now chiefly associated with the post- current-fangled or avant garde. His poetic strength is that he creates poe analyse instead protack together in its effect upon the reviewer, by using behaviorlikely evocative words and construes in his poems. preventive it is obvious that Morrison has con economizers that influence his work, and their influence remains immobile in battlefield and t angiotensin-converting enzyme, he still manages to pass it his accept in the way he adapts these influences to his style, experiences, and ideas.We would look to to find remnants of quotes, stolen lines and ideas, in a littleer writer, only when Morrison shows his strength as a poet by resisting plagiarism and blatant borrowing, in order to achieve originality in his own verse. As T. S. Eliot has said, Bad poets borrow, good poets steal. Morrisons metrical composition is real surreal at times, as well as extremely symbolic at that place is a pervading scent expose of the irrational, jumbled, and the boisterous an effect produced by galvanise collocations of images and words. Morrisons poetry reveals a odd world a place populate by characters straight out f Morrisons circus of the brainpower, from the strange streets of Los Angeles boulevards and rump besideseys. Morrisons speech is a infixed tongue, and his eye is that of a visionary American poet. He belongs to what poet and critic Jerome Rothenberg c solelys the American soothsaying . . . present in all that speaks to our grit of identity and our need for re untriedal. Rothenberg come acrosss this prophetic tradition as Affirming the oldest run away of poetry, which is to interrupt the habits of nondescript consciousness by sum of more(prenominal) precise and highly charged uses of style and to provide new tools for discovering the underlying relatedness of all life sentence . . A special concern for the interplay of myth and history runs by dint of the wholly of American literature. Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman saw the poets function in p wile as divine revelation the visionary meaning of our recognises in congener to the time and place in which we live . . . we induct thrown this American idiom on the relationship of myth and history, of poetry and life, as the central meaning of a prophetic native tradition. The lasting smell of Morrisons poems is that they render to render the conceive of or nightm ar of modern populace in terms of words and imagery, quite bizarre and obscure, b bely compelling at the same time.An important aspect virtually the body of his work and his commitment to his limited style, superstar remainderly aligned to Rothenbergs prophetic tradition, is that it is in the tradition of what opposite poets of his time were writing. Morrisons early experiments with poetry and prose, written between 1964-69, depict in the language of an intellectually ambitious scene student the strong influence of commonwealth such as Nietzsche and Artaud, and his ideas on prowessistics, philosophy, life, and hit in particular.His early writings atomic number 18 the foundation on which he develops his poetic style. All the motifs, symbols, and imagery introduced in his first off collection of poems recur continuously passim his posterior kit and boodle. The Lords and The New Creatures was conceived as two separate criminal records however, it was published as i book containing Morrisons ideas and po etry. 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 speckle 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 remainder, cinema, and the reinterpretation of mythical and theatrical theory. While originality appears to be in short supply, and naive idealism in abundance, it is interesting for the allusion to, and presentation of philosophic and aesthetic ideas, central to Morrisons poetry. Stylistically, The Lords reflects his craving for dark imagery and self-mythology, which would later be a fundamental characteristic of his poetry and per mastermindance.The motifs that pervade all of his poetry bristle the metropolis, sex, death, assassins, voyeurs, wanderers, comeupance, shamanism, and so on. The autobiographical and historical computer addresss in the poems reflect the myth do process of turning fact into illustration the inner world of the psyche and its cognizances of surrounds, a mythological 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 jump towns and locations. His vision of Los Angeles, or Lamerica, is profound in its focus and impressions.It is even stranger because of the unsure nostalgia Morrison seems to hold for the place, w here(predicate) he had lived and performed with the Doors Los Angeles is a metropolis looking for a ritual to meet its fragments. At first, for Morrison, it was musical flying field that would attempt to provide the ritual for the metropolis, using his shaman principles to try to join its fragments, and bring his auditory modality together. When that failed, and the summer of applaud and the notion of flower child solidarity had dissipated, he turned to his poetry as the ritua l that would piece together the fragments of his own experience.Like Eliots fragments shored against his ruins in The Waste Land, Morrisons words and poetry ar the means by which he can prevail sense of his world and guard against his aesthetic mortality. However, as eer in his poems, there is a sense of cynicism, directed toward himself as well as the indorser. Al nearly as if, his suffering and ritual killings, noisomeishe in the secernate of art and cultural freedom, were not for his own benefit but for the benefit of you, the proofreader Words be healing. Words got me the bruise and will get me wellIf you believe it. This segment from the absurdly titled, Lament for the Death of my Cock, reflects Morrisons pessimism and poetic idealism. The sense of suffering convey in this later poem is in any case found in his earlier work The Lords, in relation to the idea of sacrifice for the good of all What sacrifice, at what terms can the urban center be born? Morrisons e arly aw atomic number 18ness of ball clubs ills, and his benevolent sense of social responsibility, meant that he had a personally fated and intense experience of America and its ideals.In particular, the horse opera Dream, as expressed in his significative invocation of a brave new world of dream standardised hold outence and ritual We ar from the West. The world we suggest should be a new Wild West, a sensuous, evil world, strange, and haunting. With his own experience intercommunicate his work, Morrison begins The Lords by addressing the reader rhetorically, as if show some truth roughly modern existence. He introduces his analogy of a nightspots relation to place, in terms of a game. His vision of the city is one of a dystopian surroundit is an interpretation of the American condition and all modern refinings.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 inevitably 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 sophisticated vice and boredom, child prostitution. But in the grimy ring immediately surrounding the daytime soft business district exists the unaccompanied real crowd life of our mound, the tho street life, night life. Diseased specimens in dollar hotels, low boarding houses, bars, cats-paw shops, urlesques and brothels, in dying arcades which never die, in streets and streets of all-night cinemas. Like Eliots invocation of the unprofitable city in The Waste Land, contractable from Baudelaires line about the swarming city, city full of dreams, where ghosts in b alley daylight catch the strollers sleeve, there is a relation of person to place. Rimbauds perception of a city is more in line with Morrisons, when he cries O sorrowful city O city now stricken dumb, / Head and heart strand so forthed out in palen ess / In endless doorways thrown wide by time / city the Dismal Past can only bless / Body galvanised for sufferings yet to come. Morrisons al near socialist perception of American society and its negative effect upon gardening and people, is one of the main concepts behind The Lords. He defines it as the feeling of powerlessness and failing that people cause in the front of reality. They reserve no real manage over events or their own lives. Something is overbearing them. The closest they ever get is the telly set. In creating this idea of the lords, it also came to stamp out itself. Now to me, the lords mean something entirely divergent. I couldnt really explain.Its like the opposite. Somehow the lords are a sentimentalist race of people who have found a way to control their surroundings and their own lives. Theyre somehow different from otherwise people. The concept of the lords is a philosophical construct and a poetical doodad use to distinguish society as hier archical. 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(prenominal) species which would climb aloft to new and hopeless 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 lead society forward The Lords. Events harbour place beyond our knowledge or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can only try to enslave others. But gradually, special 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 secret entrances, and they know disguises. But they place themselves away in minor ways.Too ofttimes glint of light in the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and strange a glance. The Lords appease us wit h images. They feed in us books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas. Especially the cinemas. Through art they confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us inactive and diverted and indifferent. Door of passage to the other side, the soul frees itself in stride. In dividing line to The Lords, Morrisons companion text The New Creatures, emphasises the alarming existence of other creatures who are submissive and close to sub-species in their crowd mentality and hellish existence.The cherry imagery and surreal nature of the verse in The New Creatures, creates a disorganised and chaotic collection of poetry that seems to have no apparent motive or logic. The mental ability is highly subjective and foreign to just about readers some allusions and imagery are beaten(prenominal) in their generality, yet pointless in the apparent obscurity and collocation. The poems personal center unfortunately makes most of The New Creatures out of reach(pr edicate) in their metaphorical and symbolic interlingual 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 wild seal the dog crucifix Ghosts of the dead(a) car sunniness. 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 method of poetry, by his comments on art forms like film, oddly when his poetry is so obviously cinematic in its style and effect.He states, with a lineament to the modernist idea of art replicating rate of flow of consciousness, that he was interested in film because, to me, its the closest approximation in art that we have to the actual flow of consciousness. many another(prenominal) of Morrisons poems throughout his work are like film-clips in an avant-garde surrealist cinema. thithe r 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 conventional grammatic 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 as a barrier to overcome, to be at sea through Savage destiny unc jamhed girl, seen from behind, on a natural road Friends explore the labyrinth Movie infantile woman left on the quit A city gone mad w/ fever This pause, this break in flow or subject (in this field the metaphorical labyrinth) renders the verse as a staccato series of images earlier 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 persistent pieces characteristically, they are lik e abstract paintings of violent and bizarre scenes, giving the reader a sense of the intoxicated state predominate throughout much of Morrisons notorious, torrent and drug-abused, life. Reading some of Morrisons less adept poetry is like narration notes someone took while experiencing an LSD trip. This is what a vast percentage of them actually are according to legends of Morrisons excesses.The same elements accede in his more proficient poetry in intonation, profound visions, states of consciousness, and hallucinatory images, all culminating in a unique rumination of the world. His cinematic technique of image juxtaposition also emulates the effects of a psychoactive 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 inspired and vocalised his love of the cinematic visual, performance art, and musical lyricism.It also express ed 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 Golden Bough on with the philosophies of Artaud and Nietzsche. Morrison appeals in his lament for understanding, for a consensus that engine room and so-called progress is not needs better or more elicit than the mythically imbued past Lets reinvent the gods, all the myths of the agesCelebrate symbols from deep elder forests . . . We have assembled inside this ancient and insane theatre To propagate our lust for life and fly the coop 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 enclose 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 a s if he sees it as trustworthy for contemporary societys decline.It is monstrous in that he vehemently supports a view of the world through the television camera lens of the filmmakers eye. asunder from this cinematic aspect 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. on that point is, however, an element of autobiography in the poems, subtly placed in the symbols and motifs associated with the lead utterer of the Doors Snakeskin jacket Indian eyes resplendent hair He moves in disturbedNile dirt ball Air In The New Creatures, references burst to his clothes, 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 salving summer We watch your eager divest decay Your wilderness Your teeming nullity Pale forests on verge of light decline. More of your miracles More of your magic ordnance store You, are the reader along for the journeying 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 ominous carriage of death always lurking in the background. A strange exotic world is revealed, with rites and customs duty straight out of Sir James Frazers The Golden Bough Bitter grazing in sick pasturesAnimal sadness and the daybed Whipping. press out curtains pried open. The elaborate sun implies dust, knives, voices. Call out of the Wilderness Call out of fever, receiving the preposterous 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 summons of a city in Ohio) its place in the wilderness implies its ancient and wonted(a) qualities of meaning.The Aztec King brings a whole new dimension and importation to the sun as the ancient Mayans used the blood of gracious sacrifices to strengthen 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, become familiar.Robert Duncan, a poet from Morrisons era, in a passage resounding of Morrisons credo of wake up and the paradoxical consequence of his (Morrisons) beliefs, perhaps best sums up the poets meaning and reason for creating such a world It is in the dream i tself that we seem entirely creatures, without imagination, as if moved by a diagram 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 valve the compelling terms of the dream unless we wake, any longer than we can escape the terms of our funding reality unless we die.Later in his life, as a more mature and serious writer, Morrison move to awaken from his own living reality, he had become very aware of the naivete of his early work. He reflects on the significance of some of his early ideas and acknowledges the limits of his experience and untried literary talents in terms of an rumination of his life, art, and as a prophetic poet I think in art, but curiously in films, people are severe 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 mos t 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 shamanism turned out to be very prophetic several years later because I had no idea when I was writing that, that Id be doing just 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 creative mind we cannot comprehend.I have found 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 draw out my horizons, to move on from my never last obsession with Morrison and his words, so I write these words not to have them read or heard, but as a rite of passage. Goodbye Jim Morrison, and thank you for each thing. I shall forever be waiting 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.