Leonard Cohen's lives in art : the story of the artist in his novels, poems, and songs

The concerns of the artist-figure are a central issue in the work of Leonard Cohen. His novels, poems, and songs, seen as a whole, form a portrait-of-the-artist. Cohen's artist-story is crafted with attention to the romantic tradition of the Kunstlerroman but extends beyond an initial apprenticeship phase, the focus of the Kunstlerroman, offering a more extensive exploration of the artistic vocation. The artist-figure, as he develops, encounters conflicts between his vocation and the demands of the outside world. Cohen's artist-figure endeavours both to make art and to self-create, and this creative impulse is simultaneously propelled and hindered by the romantic-love relationship, by the demands of an artist's role in the public sphere, by the aesthetic requirements of art itself, and by spiritual and religious issues. The last of these four concerns provides the artist-figure with a degree of lasting comfort through its mediation of some of the ongoing internal struggles of the artistic temperament. Cohen's portrait-of-the-artist attains a degree of depth and perspective by his own artistic persona's intrusion into his work, a persona he constructs in an ironic, self-conscious, and self-reflexive fashion