Flowers for Hitler

Leonard Cohen

Oct 2013 · McClelland & Stewart

About this ebook

In Flowers for Hitler, Leonard Cohen’s third collection of poetry, Cohen first experiments with his self-consciously "anti-art" gestures: an attempt, in his own words, to move "from the world of the golden-boy poet into the dung pile of the front-line writer."  Haunted by the image of the Nazi concentration camps, the poems within are deliberately ugly, tasteless, and confrontational, setting out to destroy the image of Cohen as a sweet romantic poet.  Instead, it celebrates the failed careers and destroyed minds of such "beautiful losers" as Alexander Trocchi, Kerensky, and even Queen Victoria. Cohen, in Flowers for Hitler, is an author auditioning himself for all the parts in an unwritten play, underlining the process of self-recovery and self-discovery that is at the center of these poems.

About the author

Leonard Cohen’s artistic career began in 1956 with the publication of his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. He published two novels, The Favourite Gameand Beautiful Losers, and ten books of poetry, most recently Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs andBook of Longing. During a recording career that spanned almost fifty years, he released fourteen studio albums, the last of which, You Want It Darker, was released in 2016. Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in 2011. He died on November 7, 2016.