In Clowns in the Burying Ground, Christopher K. Coffman presents intertextual readings of the Grateful Dead and their lyrics to argue that the band’s lyricists were deeply and significantly engaged with the literary tradition.

Through an analysis of their music, lyrics, and biographies, Coffman shows how the group and its individual members drew on the canons of European and American literature to shape both the form and content of their creative work. Coffman draws on the language of the “literary fragment,” as conceived by German Romantic philosophers and their intellectual heirs, to identify how the Grateful Dead’s lyricists employed intertextuality, allusion, and other strategies to explore how meaning takes shape at the boundary between poetry and philosophy.

From Shakespeare to “Shakedown Street,” Clowns in the Burying Ground demonstrates the Dead’s literary depth and how their most successful lyrics and performances walk the line between creation and chaos.

Table of Contents:
Note on Sources  ix
Introduction. Beyond Description: Art at the Limit  1
1. That’s When it All Began: Beat Literature, Future-Founding Poetry, and the Grateful Dead  35
2. Just Like Mary Shelley: The Gothic Tradition, the American Past, and the Grateful Dead  64
3. Perchance to Dream: Ovid, William Shakespeare, and the Grateful Dead  97
4. On the Heels of Rimbaud: Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and the Nature of the Literary  121
5. Like an Angel: James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Robert Hunter’s Modernist Inheritance  155
Conclusion: All That’s Still Unsung  197
Acknowledgments  211
Notes  213
Bibliography  229
Index  243