Although American jazz musician John Coltrane reportedly wrote other poems, the fact that to date only "A Love Supreme" has been made available to the public assures its literary significance: cast in relief as an accompaniment to his best-selling and most celebrated recording, the poem represents the sole authorized and generally accessible discursive component of what would otherwise be a wholly abstract body of creative output. This has had the effect of heightening its perceived significance for interpreting Coltrane's artistic motivations and his larger spiritual and intellectual interests. The effect seems to have been at least partly by design: by this point in his career, Coltrane was suspicious of any kind of verbal framing for his music, saying he preferred to put out his albums without liner notes and let the music "speak for itself". He declined, for instance, to be profiled in what became Spellman's widely discussed 1966 volume of jazz biography as social critique, Four Lives in the Bebop Business. In this respect he contrasted with, for instance, his contemporaries and labelmates Charles Mingus and Archie Shepp, older and younger representatives of the jazz avant-garde respectively, who were much more apt to frame their music with expository text, and even to integrate the latter into the former. So the inclusion of the poem in the liner notes to A Love Supreme, a suite in four parts for Coltrane's working quartet, represented a deliberate and conspicuous gesture of artistic self-definition.