Lana Del Rey’s favourite poets
Pop music changed indefinitely when Lana Del Rey released her mellow single ‘Video Games’ in 2011, which quickly went viral online. By the following year, the singer was an established icon of alternative pop, crafting a distinctive world within the walls of her first major label album, Born to Die. Instrumentally, the record featured a mixture of baroque and hip-hop influences, creating the perfect space for Del Rey to muse upon love, longing and loss.
Since then, Del Rey has released seven more albums, a few EPs, and even a spoken word project, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, adapted from her poetry collection of the same name. From the beginning of her career, Del Rey has weaved her love of poetry directly into her work, whether name-dropping her favourite poets in her lyrics or quoting their words.
In 2012, Del Rey released the EP Paradise, containing the song ‘Body Electric’, which also appeared on the soundtrack to her 2013 short film, Tropico. Named after ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ by American poet Walt Whitman, taken from his collection Leaves of Grass, the song even features the line “Whitman is my daddy”. The singer loves the quintessentially American poet, which makes sense, given that Del Rey has also frequently celebrated (and criticised) her country through her music. Moreover, the singer has the poet’s last name tattooed on her, and she previously used the lines “do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)” from ‘Song of Myself’ as her Twitter bio.
In Tropico, Del Rey recites ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ alongside another famous American poem, Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’. The classic poem, which begins with “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”, is a staple of the Beat movement, an era Del Rey is a particular fan of. In Ultraviolence‘s ‘Brooklyn Baby’, she explicitly states this fact, “I get down to Beat poetry”.
During an interview with NPR, Del Rey explained: “I think the thing I really got from Ginsberg was that you can tell a story through kind of painting pictures with words. And when I found out that you could have a profession doing that, it was thrilling to me. It just became my passion immediately, playing with words and poetry.”
Moving forward to her 2015 album Honeymoon, Del Rey recites a section of T.S Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’ from his Four Quartets. The piece reflects on the idea of “all time” being “eternally present” and therefore “unredeemable”. This exploration of the past, present and future fits well in the middle of the album, which blends vintage-inspired orchestral strings with modern trap beats.
Finally, Del Rey also cites Sylvia Plath as a significant influence, directly referencing the poet in “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but I have it”, singing: “I’ve been tearing around in my fucking nightgown/ 24/7 Sylvia Plath”. This line alludes to Plath’s poem ‘Morning Song’, in which she writes: “One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral/ In my Victorian nightgown”. Plath is one of the finest American poets, referenced by countless musicians through the decades, so it’s unsurprising that Del Rey has also found solace in her words.
