ABSTRACT
Psychedelic rock music in the late 1960s displayed very significant differences in the US and Britain. In the latter, literature was more important than LSD. All the four themes, the literary traditions of anthropomorphism, nonsense verse, the search for lost childhood, and the quest stretched back to the Middle Ages, were significant in English psychedelia. Throughout the twentieth century, every English child read children’s authors such as Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, and A.A. Milne, and their stories and ideas found their way into the visions of musicians in a way that (with a few exceptions) bypassed American writers. The playfulness and self-deprecating humor of English psychedelia are characteristic traits that also found expression in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games.
