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.

Leonard Cohen was born into a prominent and observant Jewish family. His maternal grandfather was a rabbi who lived with the family in his retirement and at whose knee Cohen studied. Cohen felt some estrangement from the Jewish community in which he was raised, as The Favourite Game suggests when it describes its protagonist as “suspect” among certain commercial Jews, and yet with Gentiles he “often broke into little Hasidic dances around the tea table.” Despite his unwillingness to be the good Jewish son who follows his father into the family business and temple, Cohen always identified as Jewish. He was reluctant to talk about the religious aspects of his work, but it is hard to think of another popular songwriter who drew so explicitly on the Jewish tradition. The use he made of tradition was often not explicitly religious, transforming Biblical stories and images for secular purposes, while religious concerns often are expressed in modern, seemingly secular contexts. Several of Cohen’s songs, such as “If It Be Your Will” and “Who by Fire,” draw extensively from Jewish prayers. This chapter explores the influence of Judaism on Cohen’s work, and the expression that work gives to the experience of Judaism.

Leonard Cohen has been the subject of at least five video documentaries about his life and work, beginning as early as 1965, with Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, and continuing up to the present with Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love (2019). These different narratives of Cohen’s life give us conflicting perspectives, and this chapter explores how they respond to different cultural moments and how they construct differing images of Cohen’s life and work.

Unlike with Judaism and Buddhism, Cohen did not participate in the Christian religion, but he was raised in a predominantly Christian city and nation. Just as Cohen found no conflict between his Zen and his Judaism, he does not experience his Judaism as an obstacle to his appreciation of Christianity. His work frequently draws on Christian imagery, especially the figure of Jesus, and texts, especially the book of Revelation. “Suzanne,” the first song of his to be recorded, has an entire verse built around the story of Jesus walking on the water. “The Butcher” is about Jesus’s sacrifice as the Lamb of God, while “Last Year’s Man” refers to Revelation in the line, “Babylon the bride.” And since Christianity is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, Cohen’s references to these texts are also relevant to Christianity. This chapter explores Cohen’s use of Christianity in his work and discuss the ways in which it reflects on this religious tradition.

When Cohen started to write songs, the musical formation of which he was first a part was the folk scene. Cohen reports that socialist folk singers in Montreal first got him interested in songs. When he decided to pursue a career as a singer and songwriter, he went to New York, because it was the hub of North American folk music. He hung out and performed at such folk venues as the Bitter End, and his songs were first recorded by such folk singers as Judy Collins. Cohen’s earliest songs display the influence of this scene, as did his preferred style of performance, accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar. His unhappiness with the way some of the songs on his first album were produced seems to have stemmed from their not sounding like folk. And yet the lyrics of Cohen’s songs have little in common with those typical of a genre that claimed to reflect the people rather than the individual. This chapter considers how folk molded Cohen’s work, and where his work pushed the boundaries of the genre.

One might argue that Cohen expressed the world through sex – or vice versa. Some of his most memorable songs (“Marianne,” for example) use individual paramours as prisms that refract larger experience. His lyrics, while not explicit in the sense that some rock or rap songs are, often evoke the power and pleasure of sex. Both of his novels are more about sex than anything else, and his drawings feature female nudes. Cohen has asserted that he finds no tension between sex and spirituality, and songs like “Hallelujah” insist upon their deep imbrication with each other. He has been called, and called himself, a “ladies’ man,” but he also dismisses the assertion that he has been especially successful with women. In the era of #MeToo, one might think that Cohen would have come in for more condemnation, but his genuine interest in women and a lack of guilt about sex perhaps combined to forestall this. This chapter explores the uses and the meaning of sex and sexuality in Cohen’s work.

“Canadians are desperate for a Keats,” proclaimed the narrator of The Favourite Game, and Cohen himself seems to have been the poet designated to fill that role. The poets Louis Dudek and Irving Layton were his first mentors, and he was celebrated specifically for his contributions to Canadian literature. One could argue that Cohen was a member of a renaissance of Canadian literature that began in the second half of the twentieth century, and would include near-contemporaries Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, both of whom began their careers as poets. Moreover, Cohen’s songs should be read in relation to the other Canadian songwriters whose careers were contemporary and sometimes intersected, especially Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. These songs are also a contribution to that literature, and this chapter reads Cohen’s songs in that context, and to understand his importance to Canadian literature.

This chapter discusses the contested place of the Declaration of Independence in black political thought. As a document that provided a rationale for American independence, the Declaration of Independence in its own way also provided one for black political equality in the United States. This tension between intention and interpretation has made the Declaration stubbornly immune from attack by black intellectuals, politicians, and movement leaders. With rare exception, the Declaration has been attacked mostly for its exclusivity, not its content or core ethos. Even Critical Race Theory’s (CRT) modest dissent from the Declaration has been limited in its ability to transform the persistence of black support for it, making arguments for CRT’s abandonment of America’s founding principles ring hollow. Instead, the history of black political thought from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, stands squarely on the side of the Declaration’s essential truths, while admonishing America’s enduring failure to live up to them.

“Manners” alternates between the portrayal of self-reliant “gentlemen” like Montaigne, Socrates, and El Cid, who are “original and commanding” and “fashion,” an imitative “hall of the Past” where “virtue [has] gone to seed.” But near the end of the essay he turns away from forms of aristocratic morality by introducing two new heroes: a woman, “the Persian Lilla,” who reconciles “all heterogeneous persons into one society”; and then “Osman,” a poor beggar at the gates of the Shah who is a “great heart … so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the country,” and whose wealth lies in his ability to “harbor” madness without sharing it. The introduction of Lilla and Osman late in “Manners” raises the question of how they align with its other heroes. Are they part of a turn or contrary tendency showing up late in the essay, or a deeper exploration of forms of virtue – especially love – already introduced?

Chapter 10 charts Emerson’s long engagement with Hinduism, from his college years, when he rejected what he thought of as “Indian Superstition,” to the presence of the Vishnu Purāna and Bhagavad Gīta in some of his greatest essays. In “Plato, or the Philosopher,” Emerson draws from these works the idea of a fundamental unity – “The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu” – and credits Plato with absorbing, enhancing, and representing the “unity of Asia and the detail of Europe.” Emerson’s Plato is a representative of Emerson himself, a man who made lists of opposing East-West properties and tendencies on the same pages where he recorded passages from the Vishnu Purāna. Emerson finds a skeptical strain within Hinduism, particularly in “Illusions.” But he also weaves in the contrary vision of deep, but momentary, insight: “by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little.”

Chapter 1 considers how Emerson uses the essay form to present his ideas as experiments or trials, to preserve a sense of spontaneity or casualness (“I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics”) and to dramatize what he calls the “contrary tendencies” in his philosophy (“I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies”). While it is important to trace Emerson’s main positions, one misses the living nature of his philosophy unless one also takes account of the motions and patterns within his essays, and the ways he dramatizes instability, spontaneity, and inconsistency. Emerson’s description of a poem in “The Poet” applies equally to his own essays: each is a living thing, like “a plant or an animal,” each has “an architecture of its own.” The discussion focuses on the moods of “History” and “Experience,” guided by Theodor Adorno’s idea of the essay as a carpet, or an arena for thought.

The Introduction provides an overview of trademark laws that implicate the right to freedom of expression. It also introduces the concept of inherently valuable expression in trademark law. Examples include descriptive trademarks; popular phrases and designs claimed as marks for T-shirts and other types of expressive merchandise; political and social messages; words, names, and symbols important to religious or indigenous communities; popular colors and shapes; and culturally significant creative works claimed as trademarks. The introduction also discusses the proposed free speech framework for trademark law. Government decision-makers should (1) identify the purpose of this specific trademark law and determine whether it is sufficiently important; (2) evaluate whether that particular trademark law directly and materially furthers its purpose; and (3) determine whether this trademark law endangers free speech, and ensure that it suppresses or chills protected expression no more than necessary in pursuit of that important purpose. The introduction concludes with an overview of trademark registration and enforcement laws that may potentially conflict with the free expression right.

In the first part of Chapter 5, Goodman considers some basic affinities of Emerson and Montaigne that are evident even before Emerson published “Montaigne, or the Skeptic”: their use of the essay form to register spontaneity and contingency, their critique of books and travel, their discussions of the play of moods, their attention to themselves. The second part of Chapter 5 considers the shape of Emerson’s Montaigne essay, which has its own moods and its own architecture, and which concludes by taking what the critic Barbara Packer calls “a miraculous act of levitation” outside the play of moods to the moral sentiment that “outweighs them all.” In evaluating this leap, Goodman deploys Emerson’s own skepticism against his more metaphysical and dogmatic tendencies. “Why so talkative in public,” he writes, “when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute?”