It’s difficult to imagine how The Beatles would have done without John Lennon. In the early years, he became the group’s leader and developed a collaborative songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney. Together, they would create future classics like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ and ‘With A Little Help From My Friends‘.
Even as their creative paths diverged, the two remained integral to the band’s writing process. While McCartney was the driving force behind contemplative classics such as “Blackbird” and “Yesterday,” Lennon led the experimentalist “Tomorrow Never Knows” and the psychedelic “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
He preferred pop writing infused with emotional storytelling, but his interest in writing extended beyond songwriting. Even when he wasn’t writing hits, he kept putting pen to paper. He collected writings ranging from poetry to complete nonsense to doodles over the years. He eventually compiled them all into one volume and published them as In His Own Write in 1964.
Even John Lennon struggled to describe the collection of nonsense. “It’s about nothing,” he once declared in The Beatles Anthology. This is all there is to it. There’s nothing profound about it. It’s just meant to be funny. I wrote things down on sheets of paper, and stuff them in my pocket. When I have enough, I have a book.”
Though Lennon may have seen nothing in it and believed they only published it because of his position in The Beatles, it did serve as additional evidence of his instinctual desire to write. “There was never any real thought of writing a book,” he explained. “It was something that snowballed. “If I hadn’t been a Beatle, I wouldn’t have considered publishing the stuff.”
Nonetheless, he appeared to believe that this innate desire to write would have persisted even if The Beatles had not triumphed. He imagined himself as a broke writer similar to the Beat Generation. Wondering how he would have continued his career as a writer if they had not existed. “I would have been crawling around broke, just writing and throwing it away. he stated, “I might have been a Beat Poet.”
Fortunately for fans of the Fab Four, and possibly for Lennon himself, he escaped that fate and went on to become one of the most famous musicians in history. Rather than writing Beat poetry, he set his poems to the music of the Beatles.
