The Strange Case of Leonard Cohen: "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

Leonard Cohen has been a published and critically regarded poet for over fifty years, and a prolific recorded songwriter for over forty years (ca twelve poetry collections and sixteen albums). Despite his multifarious artistic endeavours, he has remained either a contentious figure for critical consideration or a neglected one. Cohen has continually evaded clear-cut classification by not fitting easily ‘into the categories of post-modern or the post-colonial; his obstinate Romanticism is seen as reactionary; and his treatment of women has been…an outright offence to feminist critics.’

In the figure of Leonard Cohen, we see an artist remake his role and redirect the scope of his influence to the point of exhaustion, if not oblivion; an introspective artist who is at war with himself, with his work, and with the collective tradition he remains attached to, if only by an invisible thread.

Cohen’s self-effacing attitude towards himself as a writer was unlikely to inspire the confidence of his most devoted critics, especially when he replaced his poetry collections with albums, triggering anxieties of popularism and material preciousness in relation to poetic art. However, Cohen’s willingness to take real risks with his work, even at the expense of falling into cliché, bathos, banality, and critical obscurity, has paid off on countless occasions and resulted in the poet-songwriter achieving artistic longevity through his great power to move, and stir the very soul of the reader or listener.

It is not by covering the cracks in this imperfect world and in his imperfect poetry that Cohen makes his poems and songs shine “like the few fragments from another culture.” It is by celebrating the flawed nature of both his poetry and his own humanness that Leonard Cohen reminds the reader that: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” For a writer to be able freely to engage his imperfections is a success in itself, but for a writer to make creative use of this weakness, and ironically acknowledge it as his strongest tool, is precisely what gives literature its life, poetry its pulse, and song its signature, ‘sincerely L. Cohen.’

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