Leonard Cohen

Leonard Norman Cohen was a Canadian songwriter, singer, poet, and novelist, born on September 21, 1934, in Westmount, Quebec, and active across the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. He first sought a life in literature, publishing poems and fiction before he began a music career in 1966. Across his work, Cohen returned again and again to faith and mortality, isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, social and political conflict, sexual and romantic love, desire, regret, and loss.

Cohen grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Montreal. His mother, Marsha “Masha” Klonitsky, had immigrated to Canada from Kaunas in 1927, and his maternal grandfather was Talmudic writer and rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline. His paternal grandfather was Lyon Cohen, founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Cohen’s father, clothing store owner Nathan Bernard Cohen, died when Leonard was nine. The family attended Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, with which Cohen kept connections for the rest of his life. In 1967, speaking of being a kohen, he said, “I had a very Messianic childhood. I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest.”

At school in Montreal, Cohen studied music and poetry, taught himself acoustic guitar, and formed a country-folk group called the Buckskin Boys. A young Spanish guitar player later taught him “a few chords and some flamenco,” after which Cohen changed to classical guitar. He credited his love of music to his mother, who sang songs around the house. At McGill University, he won the Chester MacNaghten Literary Competition, published his first poem in 1954, and graduated with a B.A. in 1955. His literary influences included William Butler Yeats, Irving Layton, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, and Henry Miller. Layton, who taught at McGill, became both mentor and friend.

Cohen’s first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in 1956, followed by The Spice-Box of Earth in 1961. Before music made him widely known, he had already spent years reading poetry in Montreal clubs, working odd jobs, and writing fiction and poems. After beginning his recording career, he released Songs of Leonard Cohen in 1967, followed by Songs from a Room, Songs of Love and Hate, and New Skin for the Old Ceremony. His best-known song, “Hallelujah,” appeared on Various Positions in 1984. Later albums included I’m Your Man, The Future, Ten New Songs, Dear Heather, Old Ideas, Popular Problems, and You Want It Darker, released three weeks before his death on November 7, 2016.

Recognition came from both literary and musical circles. Cohen was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honour. In 2011, he received one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature and the ninth Glenn Gould Prize. His words continue to reach people because they name difficult things without looking away: longing, faith, regret, loss, politics, desire, and the search for redemption. Cohen wrote and sang as someone who knew that beauty and darkness often arrive together.