Flowers for Hitler

In Flowers for Hitler , Leonard Cohen’s third collection of poetry, Cohen first experiments with his self-consciously "anti-art" gestures: an attempt, in his own words, to move "from the world of the golden-boy poet into the dung pile of the front-line writer."  Haunted by the image of the Nazi concentration camps, the poems within are deliberately ugly, tasteless, and confrontational, setting out to destroy the image of Cohen as a sweet romantic poet.  Instead, it celebrates the failed careers and destroyed minds of such "beautiful losers" as Alexander Trocchi, Kerensky, and even Queen Victoria. Cohen, in Flowers for Hitler , is an author auditioning himself for all the parts in an unwritten play, underlining the process of self-recovery and self-discovery that is at the center of these poems.