5 Rock Songs Inspired By Classic Literature

It may seem as if the worlds of classic literature and rock and roll couldn't be farther apart. Could an hour spent suppressing yawns in a high school English class be anything like attending a concert featuring your favorite rock band? Well, yeah. Even the coolest rock stars are, at the end of the day, artists — even if their artistry involves writing cheeky songs and cultivating a wild image meant to shock your parents. Yet that sort of showmanship doesn't preclude the wish to engage with other kinds of art, and it's pretty clear that quite a few rock stars love settling down with a work of classic literature. Indeed, some of the best tracks in the genre have been inspired by those very same books your English teacher may have wanted you to read all those years ago.

Sometimes, the inspiration is pretty obvious. Don't be so shocked that Iron Maiden's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's, uh, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Other songs will make you work a little harder to find the source of inspiration, like The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," which includes among its sources a much-censored Soviet novel that took over a decade for its author to write. Either way, these rock songs show that it may be time to give your English teachers some more credit for pointing you (and perhaps a few future rock stars) towards classic literature.

In the late 1960s, singer-songwriter Marianne Faithfull gave a copy of "The Master and Margarita" to a young Mick Jagger. This was an appropriately countercultural choice, as author Mikhail Bulgakov was subject to major censorship in his native Soviet Union. It also coincided with Jagger's growing artistic interest in the occult. During this period, Jagger was also influenced by 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire and Bob Dylan while writing "Sympathy for the Devil." The 1968 song, which sounds even cooler today, credits the Devil with many modern woes, including political assassinations and the Russian Revolution, while never getting around to condemning him.

"The Master and Margarita" was written over a 12-year period that only ended with Bulgakov's death in 1940. It was finally published in 1966, though the officially uncensored version wouldn't appear for years. The "Master" of the title is a novelist who checks himself into a psychiatric ward when critiques of his work become too much. His lover, Margarita, sells her soul to the Devil to get the Master out in a satirical plot that includes a sardonic devil, a talking black cat named Behemoth, and plenty of biting social commentary.

Jagger eventually lost interest in the whole occult thing, but Keith Richards has continued to talk up "Sympathy for the Devil." He told Rolling Stone in 2002 that he thought the song was "just a matter of looking [the Devil] in the face," Richards said. "He's there all the time. [...] You might as well accept the fact that evil is there and deal with it any way you can." Bulgakov might well have agreed.

Though it's a major force in heavy metal, Metallica stands on its own artistic merits. Not that you have to look too far when listening to "For Whom the Bell Tolls," given that your first clue is right there in the title. As Metallica established itself, the band sought more musical and literary complexity in their work, like Ernest Hemingway's novel of the same name. Even if it didn't chart in the U.S. at the time, "For Whom the Bells Tolls" is a fan favorite that still stands as one of Metallica's most pivotal tracks.

Hemingway's book concerns the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, a conflict that brutally outlined growing tensions between communism and fascism. In the 1940 novel, the American Robert Jordan teams up with antifascist Loyalists operating near Segovia, Spain. Over three days, Jordan successfully explodes a bridge, starts a romance with a woman named María (who could tell you a thing or two about what it was like for women during the Spanish Civil War), and befriends other fighters.

Yet, the successful bridge detonation leaves Jordan injured. He urges María and his friends to escape, but stays behind as the fascists advance, with his death all but certain. Hemingway's title is itself a reference to John Donne's "Meditation 17," which says "never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee." It's heady stuff that clearly was in Metallica's dark, increasingly philosophical wheelhouse.

Similar to the way Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" references Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," another song took its cues (and then some) from a different literary work. That's the title track on the band's fourth album, 1968's "Crown of Creation." Guitarist and singer Paul Kantner developed a militaristic beat and lyrics that sometimes crib straight from John Wyndham's "The Chrysalids," a post-apocalyptic novel published in 1955. Kantner has shrugged off copying accusations, saying that dropping literary references is fun. "I've never thought of it as plagiarism," he said (via "Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane").

Wyndham's tale is set in the far future, long after an implied nuclear war where society has responded by embracing a highly conservative religion. Part of that requires banishing anyone who's different, as that's equated with sin — and everyone's had enough of God punishing them. But things never go as planned, no matter how much God-fearing happens, and some young people in this community are born telepaths. They keep their abilities secret for a time; but, eventually, it all comes out in dramatic fashion.

A central tenet of the book is that change is inevitable, especially as new generations want to move beyond stultifying old ways. Kantner's lyrics argue that "Life is change / How it differs from the rocks / I've seen their ways too often for my liking / New worlds to gain." It was certainly fruitful ground for the countercultural Jefferson Airplane, long before they became the more mainstream Jefferson Starship.

If ever there was a literary character that seems custom-made for a Bruce Springsteen song, it may be Tom Joad. The protagonist of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, "The Grapes of Wrath," is such a powerful evocation of a grittily hopeful American that you may wonder if Steinbeck was having weird dreams about some guy in New Jersey named Bruce. Probably not, but Springsteen's 1995 track, "The Ghost of Tom Joad," remains just as powerful when he transposes Steinbeck's Depression-era themes to '90s America.

"The Grapes of Wrath" follows Joad, who completes a prison term and rejoins his family, only to learn that they've been evicted and plan to migrate to California for work. After an arduous trek, they finally make it, only to learn that jobs and sympathy are in short supply. They eventually find employment, but tragedy dogs them as a flood pushes them out of their home and sister Rose of Sharon's pregnancy ends in a stillbirth. Still, the book ends on a hopeful note. Its themes of class struggle, exploitation, and the ability to find meaning in exceedingly grim circumstances won Steinbeck a 1940 Pulitzer Prize and the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Springsteen hasn't snagged a Nobel yet, but "The Ghost of Tom Joad" won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. The song was even covered by Rage Against the Machine, which perfectly captured Springsteen's original angst, while Rage guitarist and songwriter Tom Morello has even performed it with Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Can you really combine '80s heavy metal with Romantic literature? Sure thing – at least, if you ask Iron Maiden songwriter and bassist Steve Harris. He's the mastermind behind the band's monumental 13-minute track adapting Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1798 poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In it, a mariner sets out on a voyage soon beset by storms. When an albatross appears, the sailors adopt it... but then, the mariner kills the bird for little discernible reason.

Fond of old sailing superstitions as they are, the crew believes they are now cursed — and indeed, they get stuck in becalmed seas. The other sailors punish the mariner by hanging the albatross' carcass around his neck. Another ship comes carrying Death and Life-in-Death, playing for the ship's souls. Death wins all but the mariner, who's forced to deal with shipmate ghosts, no sleep, a lack of water, and the weight of his sin. When he finally realizes that he ought to love all creatures — and not, you know, shoot them with crossbow bolts — he's released from the curse, though not its haunting memory.

There are definite parallels between Romantic Era literature and heavy metal, including fantastical recreations of history, folk beliefs, and big, big feelings. Said feelings are expressed mightily in the sprawling Iron Maiden track, and though some overtly Christian hallmarks were cut, there remain references to God. In fact, that may have been the point. Harris has said he doesn't remember what inspired him, but some suspect it a pushback against the Satanic metalhead stereotype.