Originally published by Contact Press as part of the McGill Poetry Series in 1956, Let Us Compare Mythologies was Cohen's remarkable debut. Containing poems written between the ages of fifteen and twenty, the collection was greeted with immediate acclaim, celebrated by one critic as "a brilliant beginning." In many senses, it provides a blueprint for what was to come in poem and song over the rest of Cohen's long career, which he seemed to understand--as he told an interviewer more than thirty years after its publication, he felt that what he wrote was "beautiful and that beauty was the passport of all ideas".