A short life of the author
James Douglas Morrison (8 December 1943 – 3 July 1971) was an American poet and rock musician who, as lead singer and lyricist of The Doors, became one of the most iconic and self-destructive figures of 1960s American counterculture. His published poetry — The Lords and The New Creatures (1970), An American Prayer (1970), and the posthumous collections Wilderness (1988) and The American Night (1990) — occupies an uncomfortable position in American letters: taken very seriously by a large, devoted readership and largely dismissed by the academic poetry establishment. Whether Morrison was a genuine poet or a rock star who wrote verse is a question that says as much about the biases of literary culture as it does about Morrison’s actual work.
Life
Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida, the son of a career Navy officer who would eventually become an admiral. He grew up on a series of military bases across the country — a rootless childhood that he later mythologised. He was an obsessive reader from childhood, working through Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Kerouac, William Blake, Antonin Artaud, and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death — a reading list that essentially constituted the intellectual formation of a self-made visionary poet.
He studied theatre arts and film at UCLA, where he met the keyboard player Ray Manzarek. Together with guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore, they formed The Doors in 1965, taking the name from Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (itself taken from William Blake). The band’s music — a fusion of blues, jazz-inflected keyboard, and Morrison’s baritone vocal performances — produced a run of albums from The Doors (1967) to L.A. Woman (1971) that is among the most distinctive bodies of work in rock history.
Morrison increasingly identified himself as a poet rather than a rock star. He self-published two slim volumes through his own imprint, and in early 1971 he moved to Paris, intending to leave music and devote himself to writing. He died in Paris on 3 July 1971. The cause of death was officially listed as heart failure; no autopsy was performed.
The Poetry
Morrison’s poetry must be evaluated separately from his song lyrics, though the two bodies of work share characteristics. The published poems are imagistic, incantatory, and often cinematic — they read like film scripts for movies that could never be made. His primary influences are the French Symbolists (Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé), the Beats (Ginsberg’s Howl, Ferlinghetti), Blake’s prophetic books, and the Surrealists.
The Lords is a collection of aphorisms and prose fragments about cinema, voyeurism, and spectacle — a theoretical meditation on the relationship between image and reality that draws on the work of Marshall McLuhan and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.
The New Creatures is the more conventionally poetic half of the volume: short, compressed lyrics about the desert, the city, snakes, and the recurring Morrison figure of the shaman or the “lizard king.” The best of these poems — “The hitchhiker stood by the side of the road,” “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding” — have a genuine imagistic power.
An American Prayer was privately printed in 1970 in a limited edition of 500 copies. It is Morrison’s most ambitious single poem — a long, incantatory piece that attempts to synthesise his concerns with death, the American landscape, shamanism, and the ecstatic possibilities of performance. The poem was set to music by the surviving Doors members in 1978.
Critical Assessment
The academic dismissal of Morrison’s poetry is partly justified and partly snobbish. The weakest poems are self-indulgent, portentous, and dependent on shock value for their effect. Morrison had a tendency toward apocalyptic grandiosity that, absent the force of his physical performance, can seem hollow on the page.
But the strongest poems — and there are more of them than his detractors acknowledge — have a genuine visionary intensity. Morrison’s ear for rhythm was exceptional (unsurprising in a songwriter), and his ability to create a mood of hallucinatory menace through accumulations of concrete images is real.
Collecting Morrison
The Lords and The New Creatures (1970, Simon & Schuster) in first edition brings $200–$500. An American Prayer (1970, privately printed, edition of 500) is the most valuable Morrison book: copies bring $3,000–$8,000 depending on condition. The posthumous collections Wilderness (1988) and The American Night (1990) bring $20–$50 in first edition. Morrison’s handwritten notebooks and manuscripts, controlled by his estate, occasionally surface and command very high prices.