Poet Possessed

Jim Morrison

A Poet's Manual

Jim Morrison evidently read Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy' very closely, taking it almost as a manual of poetic method. When Nietzsche says that dreams are the inspiration for the "glorious divine figures" of which the poets write, [58] Morrison will adopt this as his mode of poetic creation.

The singer Nico [59] had a brief relationship with Morrison in 1967. She wanted to write her own songs but couldn't get started. Morrison "told her to write down her dreams ... This would provide her raw material." [60]


Nietzsche would assert: "The beautiful appearance of the dream-worlds, in creating which everyman is a perfect artist, is the prerequisite of all plastic art, ... and an important part of poetry also." [61]

For Nietzsche, dreams themselves 'interpret' life, and provide ‘training’ for life, [ib.] because "our innermost beings, our common subconscious experiences, express themselves in dreams." [ib.]

Enter again the sweet forest
Enter the hot dream
JDM [62]

"Dreams are certainly an activity of the mind struggling to circumvent the formal-logical law of contradiction."[63]


Dreams are
at once fruit & outcry
against an atrophy of the senses.
JDM [64]

In his book on Rimbaud and Morrison, Fowlie confirms that Rimbaud used this method:

"By use of the dream, Rimbaud adds his testimonial to the belief of Nerval, Baudelaire and Mallarme that the purest disinterestedness of poets manifests itself in the dream." [65]

Morrison was searching for the ability to write poetry automatically [66] , for, as Nietzsche said, the Dionysiac poet creates "unconsciously." [67]

Even when awake, the poet's world must have a dreamlike quality:

"The poet is a poet only in so far as he sees himself surrounded by forms which live and act before him, and into whose innermost being he penetrates." [68]
For "at bottom the aesthetic phenomenon is simple: if a man merely has the faculty of seeing perpetual vitality around him, of living continually surrounded by hosts of spirits, he will be a poet." [ib.]

And here we can see the connection with music too, it being used to enable and to enhance this 'faculty'.

Music inflames temperament
JDM [69]

Of Schiller, Nietzsche says that "before the act of creation he did not perhaps have before him or within him any series of images accompanied by an ordered thought-relationship; but his condition was rather that of a musical mood ... A certain musical mood of mind precedes, and only after this ensues the poetical idea." [70]

Morrison would then be drawn to working with musicians hoping to unlock the free flow of his poetic dream worlds, saying that "poetry is very close to music", and that music's "hypnotic quality" puts the poet in the right "state of mind" leaving him "free" to allow his "subconscious" to "play itself out wherever it goes." [71]
Not only that, but musical accompaniment gave Morrison the feeling of "a kind of security" [ib.] to recite his poetry.

Words & Music

"Words can lie. The mode of expression never lies."
Reich [72]

"Lyric poetry is dependent on the spirit of music."
FWN [73]

"When one talks about music its power is lessened, it loses its effectiveness, the smallest loss due to verbalisation occurs in tragedy, says Nietzsche."
Meltzer [74]


Nietzsche claimed there to be a gulf and an antagonism between words and music. In a posthumously published fragment from the time of 'The Birth of Tragedy' he wrote that

"there cannot ... be any question as to a necessary relation between poem and music; for the two worlds brought here into connection are too strange to one another to enter into more than a superficial alliance." [75]

For Nietzsche, "the origin of music lies beyond all individuation," [ib.] i.e. it is primal, non-Apolline.

"The Will is the object of music but not the origin of it." As Schopenhauer - Nietzsche's mentor during the period of 'The Birth of Tragedy' - says, music is a 'copy' of the will, [76] and it certainly shouldn't concern itself with the emotions - in the way that lyric poetry does: "The lyric poet interprets music to himself through the symbolic world of emotions." [75]

Words then are parasitic and inferior to musical tones, while poetry itself is generated by "melody." [77]

Once again, we see Morrison following Nietzsche; his song writing consists in his quickly putting words to an initial melody. [78]

"A song comes with the music, a sound or rhythm first, then I make up words as fast as I can just to hold on to the feel." JDM [79]

It is the music that comes first - and last.

Nietzsche will say that "language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction - primordial pain in the heart of Primal Unity, and therefore symbolises a sphere which is beyond and before all phenomena." [80]

Morrison accordingly would feel that "lyrics aren't that necessary in music." [81]

However, Nietzsche's views on 'folk song' were no doubt interpreted by Morrison as a positive endorsement of the blues:

"What is the folk-song ... but the perpetuum vestigium of a union of the Apollonian and the Dionysian? Its enormous diffusion among all peoples, further re-enforced by ever-new births, is testimony to the power of this artistic dual impulse of Nature: which leaves its vestiges in the folk-song just as the orgiastic movements of a people perpetuate themselves in its music. Indeed, it might also be historically demonstrable that every period rich in folk-songs has been most violently stirred by Dionysian currents, which we must always consider the substratum and prerequisite of the folk-song." [82]

Nietzsche waxed poetic on the awesome transfiguring power of music: "we find our hope of a renovation and purification of the German spirit through the fire-magic of music." [83]


Similarly, Morrison saw his musical performance as a striving "to break through to a cleaner, freer, realm." [84]

Notes to The Poet Possessed
58. Nietzsche 1995 pp. 1-2
59. German born Christa Pfaffgen - "the world's first supermodel" (The Times, 26/9/2008, 'The Perfect Sturm', J. Cale, pp. 13-15) appeared in Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita' before joining Andy Warhol's 'Factory' in 1967. She made solo recordings as well as recording with the avant-garde rock group 'The Velvet Underground'. Cale, of the Velvets and her producer remarked that Morrison "drew her into his poetic circle."(ib.)
60. ed. Rocco 1997 ('Nico: The Life of an Icon', R. Witts) p. 137
61. Nietzsche 1995 p. 2
62. Morrison 1989 p. 136
63. Brown p. 319. The 'law of contradiction', also called 'the law of non-contradiction': "In modern logic, the principle that no statement of the form (p and not-p) can be true. The classical defense of the law is in Aristotle's 'Metaphysics' Book IV, 4f." (Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. T. Mautner, Penguin 1997 p. 390)
64. Morrison 1991 p. 131
65. Fowlie p. 72
66. Morrison 1989 (Prologue, 'self-interview', p. 1)
67. Nietzsche 1995 (BT 12) p. 45
68. ib. (BT 8) p. 26
69. Morrison 1991 p. 5
70. Nietzsche 1995 (BT 5) p. 14
71. Hopkins 2006 p. 214
72. Reich p. 176
73. Nietzsche 1995 (BT 6) p. 19
74. Meltzer p. 245
75. On Music and Words, F. Nietzsche, A Fragment from 1871. Available at http://users.compaqnet.be/cn127103/Nietzsche_various/on_music_and_words_and_rhetoric.htm(accessed 7/5/09)
76. Nietzsche 1995 (BT 16) p. 56
77. ib. (BT 6) p. 17
78. ed. Sugarman, 1988 p. 95
79. Rolling Stone p. 16
80. Nietzsche 1995 (BT 6) p. 19
81. Circus Magazine (1970) Interview by Stevenson available at: http://archives.waiting-forthe-sun.net/Pages/Interviews/JimInterviews/circus.html (accessed 25/07/2005) . Excerpts from this interview are also available in Henke on an enclosed CD called 'Jim Speaks'.
82. Nietzsche 1995 (BT 6) p. 17
83. ib. (BT 20) p. 75
84. Doe & Tobler p. 48