Clowns in the Burying Ground

The Grateful Dead, Literature, and the Limits of Philosophy

Christopher K. Coffman

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781478033202
  9781478029748
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478061939
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

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

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