In I am The Walrus, John Lennon told us: “Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe”. Lennon’s song, from the EP Magical Mystery Tour, is a two-fingered salute to academic efforts to impose an interpretative framework on the Beatles’ creativity.
He wrote it after learning from a pupil at his former school that the English teacher was tasking boys with formal literary analysis of Beatles lyrics. Hence the reference to Poe, which follows hard on the incongruous image of a “semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower”. “Let the fuckers work that one out, Pete!”, Lennon told former bandmate Pete Shotton.
