He was a poet first. Before the fedora, before the gravelly baritone that sounded like it was dredged from the bottom of a dry well, and long before "Hallelujah" became the most overplayed song in wedding history, Leonard Cohen was a literary wunderkind. People tend to forget that. They see the music as the main course and the books as a side dish.
Honestly? It was the other way around for him.
Cohen spent the 1950s and 60s desperately trying to be a "serious" man of letters. He was the golden boy of the Montreal poetry scene, mentored by guys like Irving Layton. He didn't pick up a guitar to become a rock star; he did it because he was starving. Poetry didn't pay the rent on his house in Hydra, so he pivoted. But if you want to understand the man, you have to look at the poetry books by leonard cohen as the actual blueprint for his soul.
The Early Years: Mythologies and Spice Boxes
In 1956, while most 22-year-olds were worrying about entry-level jobs, Cohen published Let Us Compare Mythologies. It’s a young man’s book—steeped in blood, sex, and the heavy weight of Jewish liturgy. He wasn't exactly writing greeting card fluff.
The first edition? Only 400 copies. If you find one in a dusty attic today, you’re looking at a five-figure payday.
Then came The Spice-Box of Earth in 1961. This is where he really "arrived." It’s lush. It’s lyrical. It’s also kinda terrifying in its intensity. He was blending the sacred with the profane before he ever set foot in a recording studio. Critics in Canada were calling him the next big thing, the "James Dean of poetry."
But the fame was local. The money was nonexistent.
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When Things Got Weird: Flowers For Hitler
You’ve gotta admire the guts it took to name a book Flowers for Hitler in 1964. People were confused. Some were flat-out angry. Cohen wasn't praising the dictator, obviously. He was exploring the "banality of evil" and the darkness inside everyone. He was moving away from the "pretty" poems of his youth and into something much more jagged and experimental.
It was a total pivot.
He followed it up with Parasites of Heaven in 1966. By this point, he was already starting to recycle. Some of the "poems" in this book actually became lyrics on his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. If you read "Suzanne" or "Teachers" on the page, they hit differently. There’s no fingerpicking to hide behind. Just the raw, naked word.
The Middle Period: Slaves and Mercy
By the 70s, Cohen was a cult musical icon, but his relationship with the written word was getting rocky. The Energy of Slaves (1972) is basically a poetic nervous breakdown. It’s anti-poetry. He even included a photo of himself with his hair cropped short, looking haunted. He was mocking his own reputation as a "sensitive poet."
"I have no talent left," he wrote. "I am just a man who works for a living."
It’s brutal.
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Then came Death of a Lady's Man in 1978. Not the album with Phil Spector (though that happened too and was a disaster), but the book. It’s a strange, sprawling mess of poems followed by "commentaries" on those poems. It feels like eavesdropping on a therapy session.
The Return to Grace
Book of Mercy (1984) is the one that surprises people. No jokes. No cynical asides. It’s a book of modern psalms. 50 prose poems that are pure prayer. If you’ve ever felt like your life was falling apart and you needed to talk to something bigger than yourself, this is the book.
It’s probably his most "honest" work.
The Final Act: Longing and The Flame
After a decade-long hiatus—much of it spent in a Zen monastery on Mount Baldy—Cohen returned with Book of Longing in 2006. It was a massive hit. It’s full of self-deprecating humor, drawings of naked women, and meditations on aging. He was finally comfortable being both a monk and a lecher.
He knew he was dying when he was putting together The Flame.
Published posthumously in 2018, The Flame is a heavy book. It’s got his final notebooks, his lyrics, and some of the most haunting sketches he ever drew. It feels final. Because it was.
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Why These Books Still Matter
You don't read Leonard Cohen to feel good. You read him to feel true. He had this way of articulating the stuff we usually keep hidden—the jealousy, the religious doubt, the weirdly specific ways we crave intimacy.
If you’re looking to get into his written work, don't start with the "Selected Poems." It’s too polished.
- Grab a copy of Book of Mercy. Read one psalm a night before bed. It’ll change your internal monologue.
- Find The Spice-Box of Earth. See what he sounded like before the world broke him (and before he found the beauty in being broken).
- Check out his drawings. In the later books like Book of Longing, his art is just as revealing as his stanzas. They're simple, almost childlike, but they carry a weird weight.
The reality is that Cohen’s "lyrics" were just poems that he decided to invite a guitar to. But in the poetry books by leonard cohen, the words have to do all the heavy lifting themselves. They usually do.
The next time you hear "Suzanne" on the radio, remember that those words lived on a silent page for years before they ever found a melody. Go back to the page. That's where the real ghost of Leonard Cohen is still hanging out.
If you want to truly experience the depth of his work, start by tracking down a copy of Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs. It’s the best way to see the evolution of his voice from the 50s all the way to the 90s in one sitting.