The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

In the June 1849 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay titled "Song-Writing" in which he asserted, "For my own part, I would much rather have written the best song of a nation than its noblest epic."

Pulitzer Boards took a long time to see Poe's point. On April 7th, Bob Dylan won a Special Citation "for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." This award is not comparable to an honorary doctorate. It's a genuine Pulitzer Prize.

Dylan unquestionably is one of America's greatest songwriters. He was able, at one time at least, to take young people on a guided tour of the national subconscious. He could conjure arresting images that were projections of hidden but recognizable feelings. He invented new language for members of a generation, providing aphorisms and maxims that seasoned their conversations and affected their lives. He decoded the spirit of the time with a unique clarity and later re-encoded it into cryptic but resonant songs that sounded like dispatches from the front lines in the war between reason and madness.

The principal claim supporting Dylan as poet is that Dylan is on the most intimate terms with the English language, that his use of rhyme, assonance, alliteration, imager, simile, metaphor, meter, and other poetic devices reveals someone who uses words and sounds as well as poets.

Dylan prompts the thought that instead of maintaining a sharp demarcation between poetry and lyrics, we might expand the definition of poetry to include songs that provide the same pleasures as poetry.

Still, printing songs as though they were reducible to lyrics and meant to be read as poets is sometimes adequate, but the songs are never accurately represented on the the page even though all of us who are writers continue to present them that way. Dylan's musical achievements are those of a performance artist. Separated from the music and the nasal twang and the startling cadences of Dylan's voice, the written lyrics can seem desiccated.

Maybe if readers decide that a sufficient number of songs do provide the pleasures of poetry, the books we write in the future will have both pages with poems meant to be read privately and an accompanying CD with poems meant to be heard and those meant to be sung.

Such books would have pleased Poe.

Comments

[DL]

A beautiful post, and I agree (with you -- and Poe). Something is always lost when songs, meant to be performed and recorded, are printed on the page. You beautifully make the case for Dylan as poet, then you invoke the principle that honors the distinction between different art forms.

As a practical matter, for what it's worth, when I edited "The Oxford Book of American Poetry," I felt no temptation to include the lyrics of Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Dorothy Fields, and others whom I love as dearly, or nearly. Ira G. would have been the first to denounce the "poetic" claims made for lyrics. (What all of them were too modest to say is that the craft of fitting words mosaically to a Gershwin tune or writing a stanza to quicken the composing impulses of Jerome Kern was arguably more difficult and more deserving of praise than almost anything a modern poet can do.) Yet I felt there were compelling reasons to include a Dylan song as a poem. Perhaps there is no logic to such a decision, you operate by instinct and think of reasons afterward, but I sometimes wonder whether the explanation is that the words in some Dylan songs are less dependent on the music and the presentation than is true of the lyrics of "Lovely to Look At" or "The Lady is a Tramp."

[Lawrence J. Epstein]

Thanks, David. What an intriguing notion that some lyrics can be "less dependent on the music and the presentation." That insight merits attention. I wonder what differences there are between the two types of lyrics and whether other lyricists can match Dylan. Among popular songwriters Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell come to mind as candidates. You mentioned Lorenz Hart. His rhymes are so clever and so intricate sometimes that I wonder if he can be included as well, or, if not, why not. You've given me some interesting questions to think about!

[Jenny Factor]

On This American Life about 9 months ago, there was an episode called "The Break Up". In it, one of the regular TAF reporters is heartbroken, and she decides she needs to write a song about the relationship--although she plays no instrument and she cannot sing. Her goal simply is to write the LYRICS--and knowing fine musicians--she plans to find a composer to help her "set" her song.

I know this post seems a bit circuitous, but there's a point in here somewhere.

Ultimately, the reporter begins a series of telephone conversations with Phil Collins who explains to her the difference between clever lyrics and a moving break-up song. He makes it clear that very simple, even "purple' phrases can work in a song because of the setting--words that wouldn't work in a poem.

By the end of the podcast (originally a broadcast), I had an instinctive sense of why and where excellent lyrics can diverge from poems. It helps to hear her swap out phrases, and to hear her favorite sample songs side by side.

The podcast is worth tracking down.

-J.F.

[Lawrence J. Epstein]

Thanks for the tip, Jenny. I'll try to find it. The whole notion of music covering up simple phrasing that wouldn't be accepted in written poems is very interesting.

Larry