Leonard Cohen: The Poet Who Sang Through the Cracks

Ring the Bells That Still Can Ring

“Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”

Those four lines, from the song “Anthem” (1992), may be the closest thing to a personal creed that Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) ever offered. They contain everything that made him extraordinary: the insistence on beauty in brokenness, the refusal of perfection, the spiritual searching, and the poet’s ear for the line that cuts straight to the bone.

Cohen was a poet who became a singer, a Jew who became a Buddhist monk, a womanizer who became a recluse, and a man whose voice — that low, gravelly, barely-a-voice — became one of the most recognized and beloved sounds in popular music. He wrote “Hallelujah,” “Suzanne,” “Bird on the Wire,” “Dance Me to the End of Love,” “I’m Your Man,” and dozens of other songs that people cling to in their darkest and most luminous hours.

He was not a pop star. He was something rarer and more lasting: a liturgist for the secular age, a man who brought the language of prayer and scripture into the world of popular song.

Westmount: The Rabbi’s Grandson

Leonard Norman Cohen was born on September 21, 1934, in Westmount, an affluent English-speaking neighborhood of Montreal, Quebec. His family was prominent in the Canadian Jewish community. His maternal grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klinitsky-Klein, was a Talmudic scholar. His paternal great-grandfather, Lazarus Cohen, had been president of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim.

The family name was significant: Cohen — kohen — the priestly caste. Leonard was acutely aware of this heritage. He once said: “I had a very messianic childhood. I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the first high priest.”

His father, Nathan, a prosperous clothing manufacturer, died when Leonard was nine. The loss was devastating. Cohen later described tearing open his father’s bow tie, writing a message, and burying it in the garden — his first act of writing as ritual, of words as sacred objects.

He attended McGill University, where he published his first book of poetry, and then did graduate work at Columbia before decamping to the Greek island of Hydra, where he lived through the 1960s, writing novels and poetry and leading a bohemian life of extraordinary beauty and occasional misery.

From Poetry to Song

Cohen was already an acclaimed poet and novelist — author of Beautiful Losers (1966) and several poetry collections — when he arrived in New York in 1966, at thirty-two, to try his hand at songwriting. He was older than the folk-rock crowd, less conventionally handsome, and his voice was thin and limited.

None of that mattered. His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), contained “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne,” “Sisters of Mercy,” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” — songs of such literary precision and emotional depth that they immediately set him apart from every other singer-songwriter in the world.

His subsequent albums — Songs from a Room (1969), Songs of Love and Hate (1971), New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974) — established him as a unique presence: too literary for pop, too popular for the academy, too Jewish for the counterculture, too dark for the mainstream. His audience was passionately devoted and relatively small. He was a cult artist of the highest order.

Hallelujah

In 1984, Cohen released the album Various Positions, which included a song called “Hallelujah.” His record label barely promoted it. Columbia Records president Walter Yetnikoff reportedly said: “We know you’re great, Leonard, but we don’t know if you’re any good.”

The song — which weaves together the biblical stories of David and Bathsheba with the complexities of human love, sex, and spiritual longing — is now considered one of the greatest songs ever written. It did not become famous until a decade later, when Jeff Buckley recorded his devastating cover version in 1994. Since then, “Hallelujah” has been covered by more than 300 artists and has become a kind of universal hymn — sung at weddings, funerals, vigils, and moments of collective emotion around the world.

The song’s power lies in its refusal to choose between the sacred and the profane. The same word — hallelujah — is used for divine praise and for sexual ecstasy. Cohen insisted that they were not separate. “This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled,” he said. “But there are moments when we can reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.’”

Buddhism and the Mountain

In the 1990s, battered by depression, financial troubles, and creative exhaustion, Cohen withdrew from public life and moved to the Mount Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles. For five years, he lived as a student of Roshi Joshu Sasaki, a 90-year-old Zen master. He was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk in 1996.

He woke at 2:30 a.m. He meditated for hours. He cooked for the community. He shoveled snow. He did not write songs.

But he never stopped being Jewish. “I’m not looking for a new religion,” he said repeatedly. “I’m quite happy with the old one.” Buddhism, for Cohen, was a discipline — a practice of attention — not a replacement for the tradition he had inherited. He continued to observe Jewish holidays, to identify as a kohen, and to draw on Jewish liturgical language in his songs.

The Final Flourish

Cohen returned to touring in 2008, at seventy-three, after discovering that his former manager had embezzled his retirement savings. What might have been a humiliating necessity became a triumph. His concerts — three hours of impeccable musicianship, dry wit, and spiritual generosity — were revelatory. Audiences wept. Critics declared them the greatest live performances of their generation.

He released four final albums — Old Ideas (2012), Popular Problems (2014), Live in Dublin (2014 live album), and You Want It Darker (2016) — all of them remarkable. The last, released just weeks before his death, is one of the great farewell albums in music history. The title track, “You Want It Darker,” includes the Hebrew word hineni — “here I am” — the response Abraham gives to God before the binding of Isaac. It was Cohen’s final declaration: present, unafraid, facing the end with the same unflinching honesty that had defined his life.

Leonard Cohen died on November 7, 2016, at eighty-two. His son Adam said: “He died with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records.” The poet had said everything he needed to say. The bells that still could ring had rung.