Jim Morrison: Inside the Poetry of the ‘Lizard King’

Although all poets have events in their life that inspire their work, Jim Morrison’s unusual writing draws attention to the artist’s unique story and lifestyle. Born into a military family, Morrison encountered a very migrative and unstable childhood, distant parenting, and global events of his baby-boom generation. The iconic frontman’s dramatic, short lived, counter-culture lifestyle echoed these peculiar aspects of his background. These events and their effect on him as an artist emerged in the poet’s mature work. Morrison’s poem and iconic song “The End” was originally written as a reaction to the recent break up of his girlfriend, but evolved into a complicated series of references …show more content…
He devoured the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, “who’s views on aesthetics, morality, and the Apollonian-Dionysian duality would appear again and again in Jim’s conversation, poetry, songs, and life” (Hopkins, Jerry; 17). Alongside Nietzsche, he studied authors and poets such at Rimbaud, Blake, Kerouac, Ginsberg, as well as many French existentialist philosophers (Losowsky; 1). Later in his high school career, Jim began becoming a writer: keeping daily observations, thoughts, and quotes in various journals and spiral notebooks, As he entered his senior year he began to increasingly wrote poetry. He was developing into his own style after years of engrained ideas of Rimbaud’s tragedies, the homosexuality of Ginsberg, Whitman, and Rimbaud, the alcoholism of Baudelaire, and the madness and addiction of many other authors whose “pain married with the visions. The pages of Jim’s notebook became a mirror in which Jim saw his reflection” (Hopkins, Jerry;18). These writer’s and their ideas became the root of Morrison’s influences which sprouted later in his life. A key inspiration came from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which described the tale of Oedipus described by Nietzsche as the “most sorrowful figure of the Greek stage” (Hopkins, Jerry; 98). Morrison would go on to apply this mythology in his later poetry and even in his own