Christopher K. Coffman. Clowns in the Burying Ground: The Grateful Dead, Literature, and the Limits of Philosophy. Duke University Press, 2026. 251 pp.
Review by Olivia Carter Mather, Chapman University
There are a few rock artists with both devoted long-term followings and an unconventional musical style that repels other listeners. Their repertoires establish a bedrock that, for fans, is both the center of the rock solar system and an alternate universe that critiques the assumptions of rock altogether. Others find their unpolished recordings to be an acquired taste. One of those artists is Bob Dylan, another is the Grateful Dead.
The Grateful Dead was a psychedelic rock band that emerged from the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s. Its members started out in folk, bluegrass, blues, jazz, and early rock ‘n’ roll. The Dead came of age in the mid-1960s Bay Area counterculture, itself an heir of the 1950s Beat poets and the CIA’s LSD program. In 1965, they pioneered psychedelic rock when they played for Ken Kesey’s acid tests and staged multi-media performances with visual artists. By 1970, the Dead had pivoted back toward folk and experimented with country on the albums Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. They recorded some of their most famous songs during this period (“Ripple,” “Truckin’,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Casey Jones”). Unlike other bands in their scene, the Dead was a musical collective based on the curiosity of its members (collectives don’t often cohere for long, but this one did.) Individual members specialized in side projects, collaborations, and unexpected musical skills (such as Jerry Garcia‘s competency at one of the most difficult string instruments, the pedal steel guitar, which he played on Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s famous “Teach Your Children,” among other tracks). The band was best known for the communal energy of their live performances that featured all their previous styles of music, though their concerts were not the large-scale spectacles of their arena rock contemporaries such as the Rolling Stones, Queen, or Boston. Extended jams, long and improvisatory medleys, guest musicians, and covers filled their set lists, earning the Dead’s place as the original “jam band.” Performances were open-ended: creating music that couldn’t be completed, exhausted, or finished.
In congruence with their music, the Dead’s lyrics are often incoherent, unbounded, or enigmatic (“Didn’t get to sleep last night till the morning came around” or “the shoe is on the hand it fits”). The Dead famously sang about folk tales, mysticism, drug trips, and outsider status, but as a new study demonstrates, their lyrics sourced the literary canon. In his 2026 book, Clowns in the Burying Ground: the Grateful Dead, Literature, and the Limits of Philosophy, Christopher K. Coffman shines a light on the band’s approach to words, showing how the Dead’s lyrics—fragmentary, paradoxical, at times disorienting—rework well-known texts in English literature. Coffman’s argument is that reading the band’s lyrics through the concept of the Romantic literary fragment reveals how they question the notion of the coherent subject. The book features one chapter on the Dead’s connections to Bob Dylan, and the rest of the book offers interpretations of the Dead that run parallel to possibilities for Dylan studies.
A scholar of English language and literature, Coffman rehearses a version of the “Romantic literary fragment” that comes from French post-structuralist philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, whose theory responds to a line of thought on subjectivity going back to Kant. The power of the literary fragment is not just in its ability to point to art as unfinished, but in its state of devolution to open new possibilities for creation. Such art presents as incomplete, incoherent, crumbling, fragmentary, or in ruins, all the while based on a compositional strategy that seeks new productivity: the fragment “falls short of achieving entire unity, but gestures toward the inexhaustible processes that underlie creative powers in general” (8). What this means first for the Dead and Dylan is that their lyrics, on the surface paradoxical, use allusion to make new meaning. It also means that their lyrics will point to their own fragmentary state as a way of mining liminal spaces for the origins of creativity. Both artists exhibit an understanding of the Romantic literary fragment as a tool for an updated critique of the postwar American subject. However, Coffman never mentions Derrida or the word “post-structuralism,” so it’s unclear how Coffman perceives post-structuralism more broadly.
Coffman has taken on lyricists with an unconventional approach to songwriting: the Dead collaborated with several lyricists in partnerships that blurred the boundaries of band membership. The Dead were not simply performing someone else’s songs (though they often covered songs by established artists, including Dylan). Their original songs arose out of a give-and-take between musicians and lyricists, with both types of artists knowledgeable in the other one’s craft. Although musicians Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir occasionally contributed lyrics, poet-lyricists Robert Hunter, John Perry Barlow, and Robert Peterson wrote most of the band’s famous songs. The book focuses on the work of Hunter, the only member of any band to earn induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a non-performer. Hunter’s compositions include, among others, “Ripple,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Dire Wolf,” and “Terrapin Station.”
At its most concrete, Clowns in the Burying Ground is about how Grateful Dead lyrics engage the literary tradition through allusion, topic, structure, and more. Much of their lyrics center on concepts such as play, transgression, the ephemeral, destruction vs. creativity, darkness, unease, and travel. Chapter 1 establishes the Dead’s connections to the Beat poetry scene in the Bay Area and the band’s friendships with figures such as Neal Cassady. Coffman’s interpretation of the song “The Other One” summarizes much of his argument about the Dead’s lyrics: this songwriting “is not only a search for the liminal zones that allow for social reconfiguration, but also a means to subjective redefinition” (53).
Chapter 2 offers masterful discussions of songs like “Dire Wolf,” “Friend of the Devil,” and others to display how the Dead adopted Gothic horror’s critiques of society and the human subject. This chapter analyzes allusions to multiple texts in the larger gothic tradition, including Shelley’s Frankenstein, (“Just like Mary Shelley, Just like Frankenstein” from “Ramble on Rose”); Goethe’s Faust (demonic dogs and the “devil’s bargain” concept in “Friend of the Devil”); and Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (Hunter documented its impact, in movie form, on “Dire Wolf”). This chapter also notes individual members’ fascination with fantasy, sci-fi, and horror literature as a background explanation for less musical aspects of the band’s history, such as their lightning bolt logo, their powerful but unstable sound system, and their soundman’s lab-like production of LSD.
The third chapter culls from multiple Shakespearean sources, and it is here that Coffman first connects Dylan to the Dead’s imaginary literary reservoir. The band’s most explicit references to Shakespeare occur in two of the Dylan songs they covered, “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” and “Desolation Row.” The Shakespearean reference in “Desolation Row,” is of course, Ophelia (“Now Ophelia, she’s ‘neath the window / For her I feel so afraid”). Dylan’s Ophelia is set at Romeo and Juliet’s balcony, and instead of meeting a tragic end as in Hamlet, she is tormented by her own curiosity for the abject. Coffman’s comments on the song are worth quoting at length, because they speak to the fragment as central to the interpretation of lyrics:
While [Dylan’s] adaptations honor the literary sources that are their intertextual forebears, the adaptations proceed in a highly selective manner. The verse of “Desolation Row” in which Dylan offers his vignette of Ophelia, for example, approaches the language, images, and performative dynamics of Shakespeare’s works as portions of a common fund on which he may draw in service of his own compositions. These several fragments of image, dialogue, and dramatic attitude claimed from Shakespeare’s oeuvre here serve the individual work that is “Desolation Row,” but they are by no means merely backward-facing allusions. They are, instead, reaching in all directions at once, taking shape not only in relation to the predecessor texts that undergird them, but also interacting even more immediately with the maelstrom of other fragments of narratives and lyrics that “Desolation Row” presents. In employing such an approach, Dylan’s intertextual uses of Shakespeare’s language and dramatic action—both in their simple factuality and in their exploration of terms for engagement with the earlier poet’s corpus—take shape in relation to the other fragments among which they are presented, highlighting the process of fragmentation itself and paying tribute to the fundamental productive energy described by the aesthetics of the Romantic fragment. (100)
“Desolation Row” is thus a surface-level example of how the Romantic fragment works, all the more important because of the Dead’s interest in the song and because, as Coffman substantiates later in the chapter, the Dead conversed with Shakespeare in more complex ways. After explaining songs that recall King Lear, The Tempest, King John, and Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott,” Coffman spends about ten pages of Chapter 3 on the Dead’s “Althea.” Already complicated through Shakespeare’s use of the classical myth in 2 Henry VI and 2 Henry IV, Hunter’s Althea synthesizes her literary history into a complex new figure. Hunter puts her into a modern conversation with the song’s “I,” its presumably male subject. She references Hamlet’s soliloquy as well as the graveyard scene’s gravediggers, complicated by Hunter as “clown[s] in the burying ground,” an allusion to the near ubiquity of the fool in Shakespeare’s plays. The ambiguities here serve a purpose: “the songwriter, in allowing the characters of Hamlet, Ophelia, and Althea’s interlocutor to bleed into one another, as does Dylan with Romeo and Ophelia in ‘Desolation Row,’ clearly employs Shakespearean material to stage advice that will spur the song’s first speaker from dreamlike hesitation into action” (112).
The lyrics of a song like “Althea” confirm that Dead songs interacted with English literature in a complex way, yet the song also exposes the limits of literary criticism when applied to popular music. As with many Dead recordings, Garcia’s vocal was mixed to be “back” in the mix. Combined with Garcia’s relaxed vocal delivery, this produced a vocal whose words are occasionally indecipherable, or at best, in competition with other sounds on the recording, thus downplaying lexical meaning for the listener. Coffman mines meanings that don’t present as apparent because the lyrics themselves aren’t clearly communicated. Musical style thus gains more leverage in a listener’s impression even more than if all the words were easy to perceive. In the case of “Althea,” the musical style pushes against Coffman’s interpretation that “Hunter . . . follows Shakespeare in interweaving intimations of wisdom uncovered in unexpected places with a sense of urgency and dread” (111). The first studio recording of the song (from 1980) features a twangy, clean, electric guitar line in imitation of a pedal steel guitar. The chirpy sound of the electric lead, moderate tempo, and stripped-down arrangement evoke outlaw country, specifically the 1970s recordings of Waylon Jennings. Some of the guitar techniques (specifically the hammer-on) mirror country guitar playing in general and country-inflected 70s rock like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” from 1974. The music has a laidback feel, not a “sense of urgency and dread.” This is an unexpected backdrop for a song about asking advice from a composite Althea.
Read through the lens of country or southern rock, lines like “now cool down, boy / Settle back easy, Jim” and “Ain’t nobody messin’ with you but you” connote either white working-class speech or African American speech (both of which show up in roots styles also loved by the Dead.) Furthermore, we might look for country lyrical tropes such as rambling, which “Althea” references directly. The “I” tells Althea that “he’s a “roving sign” who’s “born to be a bachelor.” Unable to stay put in one place, a rambler naturally would be “feeling lost” and “lacking in some direction,” or running away from trouble (“I told Althea that treachery / Was tearing me limb from limb”). Althea herself then plays the part of the “good woman” who offers comfort (“You’re gonna want a bed to lay your head / And a little sympathy”) without complaining about his lack of commitment to her. Yet all of this is too much for the rambler, who, right before reminding her that he’s a “roving sign” muses upon her words (“The time has come to weigh those things”) and discerns that he needs to move on (“This space is getting hot”). The song recalls the rambler themes in hits from the late 1960s through the 1970s (John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind,” made famous by Glen Campbell in 1967; the Allman Brothers’s “Ramblin’ Man” from 1973; and 1979’s “Goodbye Stranger” by Supertramp). Other Dead songs feature rambling prominently (“Friend of the Devil,” “Truckin’,” and “Black-Throated Wind”) as do songs they covered (“Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” “El Paso,” and “Me and Bobby McGee”). Rambling in Grateful Dead lyrics probably has at least two sources, the folk, blues, and country songbook as well as Kerouac’s On the Road, certainly known by Hunter and the rest of the band.
Chapter 4 is where Coffman addresses the multilayered relationship between the Dead and Dylan. To this point having demonstrated the robust literary qualities of the Dead, Coffman here positions them level with Dylan. Titled, “On the Heels of Rimbaud: Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and the Nature of the Literary,” the chapter summarizes the artists’ interactions and direct consequences on each other. Dylan admired the Dead and shared billings with them (or individual members) from the 1970s through the 1990s. These moments of official interaction illuminate how the Dead “left its mark on Dylan, and in a manner that reshaped his attitudes toward touring and songwriting, activities that for him were rooted in his feelings about his own music” (128). Coffman’s take on Dylan’s mid-80s period is that aside from lower album sales and concert attendance, Dylan was discouraged about his relationship to artistic production. This was partially a crisis of subjectivity, where Dylan felt alienated from his own music and from the folk and blues he had always loved. He was also burnt out on touring, having borne the expectations of an entire generation for several decades. Dylan found kindred spirits in the Dead, especially in Jerry Garcia, who carried a similar burden (Garcia was seen by many as the leader of countercultural music). Jamming with the Dead resurrected Dylan’s first loves of folk and blues, musically bringing him back home. Critics and fans have long recognized—and celebrated—the Dylan-Dead kinship; statistics are easily available on how and when the artists collaborated and covered each other’s songs, but Coffman’s fifteen-page discussion of the relationship collects the key facts in one place. Coffman credits the Dead for reviving Dylan’s career, an argument that he supports through historical accounts, quotes from Dylan, and Dylan’s embrace of touring in his late career. In a metacritical move, Coffman also examines Dylan’s commentary on “Truckin’” in The Philosophy of Modern Song, offering more proof of the Dead’s multi-faceted clout.
Having convinced the reader of the Dead’s significance for Dylan’s return to himself, the Dylan chapter turns to French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. Coffman’s contention is that the Dead’s lyrics interact with Rimbaldian sensibilities much like Dylan’s do, and that the Romantic fragment is the method. The Dead’s lyricists consumed Rimbaud’s ideas directly (Hunter was highly conscious of Rimbaud’s work and his philosophy of sensory disorientation) and indirectly through their knowledge of Dylan’s lyrics. Coffman’s objectives here are more exploratory and less refined into precise reasoning, though it’s clear that in comparing the Dead to Dylan along Rimbaldian lines, he’s bolstering his claims about their seriousness as artists. The chapter opens with quotes from Hunter and Garcia praising Dylan for legitimizing rock through “respectability,” “authority,” and “being literate in music” (121). In this second half of the chapter, Coffman analyzes songs of both artists along three Rimbaldian lines. All three ways relate to the concept of the Romantic fragment.
First is Rimbaud’s “derangement of the senses,” the belief that to be a poet, one must consciously disrupt, dysregulate, and disorder sensory experience. Such surrender generates a new freedom of creativity. Coffman quotes a verse from “Mr. Tambourine Man” as an example of Dylan’s Rimbaldian rite of passage (“Take me for a trip upon your magic swirling ship / My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip”). The subject has lost grounding literally—he’s on a ship not under his control and perhaps not controlled by anyone as it swirls. His senses don’t provide any useful knowledge. Furthermore, he’s not afraid of disorientation, but seeks it out as he “promises to go under [a spell].” As in Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat,” the experience of disorientation happens through an encounter with art (poetry for Rimbaud, music for “Mr. Tambourine Man”). Coffman then presents two Dead songs (“The Music Never Stopped” and “Franklin’s Tower”) as equally concerned with overwhelming sensory experience, in this case, experiences of sound. In a section ostensibly about how both artists were interested in Rimbaldian disorientation, Coffman writes, “the Grateful Dead join Dylan in recognizing that experience beyond the pale is tied to the power of art, and that the artists—whether figured as a boat, the Tambourine Man, or a musician in ‘a band out on the highway’—both profits from extraordinary conditions and encourages others to share them” (142). In other words, the work of the poet is to enter liminal spaces bravely with the purpose of inviting others to do so. Coffman also identifies that it’s music that does the work, an argument that needs further exploration.
Indeed, several other Dead songs, not specified by Coffman, do this work of inviting the listener into a sensory experience. The most literal of these is “Uncle John’s Band,” where the singer asks us to “come with” to “hear Uncle John’s band,” a band whose audience is nature (“the tide”). The lyrics “beg” the listener to request a song to be played on the violin, yet the musician doesn’t know how to play the song (“how does the song go?”). Furthermore, the song promises a resolution at the end of the concert (“he’s come to take his children home”), yet the music at the end of the original recording challenges a resolution. After spending most of its time using the basic chords of G major, C major, and D major (with occasional minor chords in A minor and E minor), the band adds an outro that almost sounds like a different song. While hovering on D minor (an unexpected shift given the song’s solid grounding in the chords previously mentioned), the singers end the song on nonsense syllables like “da” and “dee.” The song aligns with Rimbaud’s ideals in both words and music. Analyzing such a song would demonstrate Coffman’s link between Rimbaud and the fragment: “adoption of a mode of seeing and being that prioritizes the intense, revelatory moment . . . is eminently amenable to the Romantic notion that the fragment nestles traditional assumptions and perceptions in a matter that opens the way to the emergence of beauty and truth” (138).
After aligning the Dead’s lyrics with Rimbaud’s “disorder of the senses,” Coffman progresses to Rimbaud’s critique of authenticity, that the self must be broken down, fragmented, to become visionary. As Coffman explains,
Rimbaud’s declaration that the self has become foreign coincides with the Romantic view that the poetic fragment is not only an entrance into the space of literary productivity, but also an opening to the interplay between the dissolution of the former self and the recognition of possible selves. This limen is the point at which exchanges transpire between creation and death, and it is the point from which the subject creates itself. To recognize that the self emerges from these exchanges between destruction and creative power allows one to register the internal and external constraints to self-realization. This perspective can be that which affords the grounds for critique, whether of others or oneself. (142)
Coffman highlights songs that betray the voice as divided against itself in Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Visions of Johanna,” and the Dead’s “Cream Puff War,” “Truckin’,” “Wharf Rat,” and “Black-Throated Wind.” In all of these, songwriters challenge the self as whole, sturdy, or stable. As Coffman argues about “Black-Throated Wind,” risking dissolution is the first step in rebuilding the Rimbaldian self and providing a space for creative works to emerge. It’s in this section that Coffman engages Timothy Hampton’s discussion of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” but only to cite Dylan’s switch from external to internal questioning. He does not credit Hampton for applying Rimbaud’s self-undoing to the act of creation.
Coffman’s last point about Rimbaud is that both Dylan and the Dead adopted his experiments with language. Shifts in perspective of the speaker, confusing turns of phrase, and stark images juxtaposed against each other are all present in the work of all three artists. Coffman focuses on the seeming incoherence of vibrant juxtaposed images, manifest in Dylan’s “Desolation Row” and the Dead’s “Dark Star” (“Reason tatters / the forces tear loose / from the axis”), “What’s Become of the Baby,” and “China Cat Sunflower.” (Other Dylan songs that come to mind are “My Back Pages,” “Chimes of Freedom,” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”) The connection to Rimbaud is in the way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The accumulation of symbolist imagery builds a picture of a fragmented subject, coherent as a montage. In this way, poets can create a disordered subject, but through the use of language. This last application of Rimbaldian fragmentation perhaps has the most potential for Dylan studies.
A few oversights need to be noted regarding Chapter 4. The first is in Coffman’s explanation of how Dylan first encountered Rimbaud. He relies on Robert Shelton, who claims that he suggested Rimbaud to Dylan on several occasions only to discover that Dylan had likely known Rimbaud the whole time. How and when poets encounter important texts is rarely certain, but this anecdote further mystifies Dylan, while Dylan’s own recollection, whether true or not, seems clear. In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan credits Suze Rotolo, and he even cites Rimbaud’s “I is someone else” letter, the touchstone of symbolist poetry. A second oversight is the cadre of literary studies on Dylan. Coffman does discuss Hampton, but only a little, and doesn’t mention work by any other Dylan scholar besides Anne-Marie Mai.
In Chapter 5 (“Like an Angel: James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Robert Hunter’s Modernist Influence”), Coffman shifts to literary modernism. He accentuates two ways the Dead intersected with authors like James Joyce and Rainer Maria Rilke: 1) Joyce’s modernism shaped Dead lyrics (in particular the 1973 album Wake of the Flood); and 2) Hunter’s non-Dead work can be explained through Rainer Maria Rilke’s preoccupations with the place of the muse, the poet’s troubled relationship to transcendence, and poetry’s ability to enact transformation. Both efforts move Coffman’s overall argument forward, as he broadens the literary world of the Dead through his analysis. The effect of this chapter is to submit Robert Hunter as deserving of literary attention along the lines of Dylan studies. Dylan himself did that work, of course, in his numerous songwriting collaborations with Hunter, starting in the 80s.
The book’s conclusion suggests new lines of inquiry that, if realized, would produce a diverse and disparate field of Dead studies. Coffman identifies five lines of inquiry: 1) the literary influences of Ken Kesey and Kurt Vonnegut on Dead lyrics; 2) anonymous sources that fuel the Dead’s and Dylan’s songs (the Bible, nursery, rhymes, and folk songs); 3) the Beats poets; 4) the work of other artists in the Dead’s community not reviewed in the book; and 5) the poetry of Hunter, Barlow, and Peterson not treated in Coffman’s study. Coffman then reverses the reasoning of the book to show how the Dead affected contemporary writers. This thesis is mentioned at the beginning of the book but only takes hold at the end. The band was, of course, the subject of texts like Thomas Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and a synecdochical stand-in for the counterculture in writing by Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, and others, but more to the core of Coffman’s work are the authors that structured their texts around the idea of the fragment as a way of opening new imaginary worlds. Here he includes authors like George R.R. Martin, Richard Brautigan, and Douglas Copeland, the last of which he underscores in a discussion of Polaroids From the Dead. He describes how the character Columbia receives fragmentary memories of her mother’s life, and how these stories suggest other, still incomplete stories that will carry into the future. At the end of the Conclusion, Coffman lands on the idea that ties the book together: what the Dead have done, through Hunter (mainly), is not simply receive guidance from the literary canon, but contribute to it by singing about the complexities of the poetic act itself, all while living the lives of Rimbaldian sensory disorientation. It’s an implicit appeal to apply the forces of Dylan studies to the Dead.
Clowns in the Burying Ground sparks new questions about creativity for Bob Dylan’s work. The most tangible avenue of investigation is Dylan’s songwriting output with Robert Hunter. This body of work comprises most of an album (eight of ten tracks on 2009’s Together Through Life) plus three songs (“Silvio” and “Ugliest Girl in the World” from 1988’s Down in the Groove and “Duquesne Whistle” from 2012’s Tempest). This total of eleven recorded songs may be the most prolific of Dylan’s lyrical songwriting collaborations. Such scrutiny could be broadened to all Dylan’s post-1987 songs due to the Dead’s potential impact, approaching his recent poetry through the lens of the Dead’s version of the Romantic literary fragment. The Dead were also interested in juxtapositions, incoherence, disorder, exposing inauthenticity, and conversation with English literature, if not with the bite of some of Dylan’s most famous work.
Lastly, Coffman’s study prompts a shift in our view of Dylan’s process and inspiration. The default is to bill Dylan as a soloist who only dabbled in collaboration. If the Dead catalyzed Dylan’s reorientation, we are forced to reconsider the solitary poet. What if, as a thought experiment, we center his partnerships, whether in songwriting, the recording studio, and on stage? This might balance the magnetic pull of his singular figure as heroic, original, and independent, enabling us to see another side of his (collaborative) creativity.
