It would be interesting to try to extract one historical philosophy from Cohen's many little hints. It is clear that Cohen places, or at one time placed, some hope in a kind of leftist Messianism. This isn't odd for his generation. But there are glimpses also of his cynicism and despair, his suspicion that, in terms of the presence of the divine in the world, it will never get better than it is now. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is.
Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique.
If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn't have been content to enjoy the atmosphere. If an unpublished poet discovers one of his own images in the work of another writer it gives him no comfort, for his allegiance is not to the image or its progress in the public domain, his allegiance is to the notion that he is not bound to the world as given, that he can escape from the arrangement of things as they are. Cohen's lyricism struggles with the weight of an intellectual maturity uncharacteristic of the Beat writers. And although much in his tone and his milieu may place him with Ginsberg and friends, Beautiful Losers is a novel on another level. It is serious literature.