The Bob Dylan Entry in the "Oxford Book of American Poetry"

We repost this piece, which first appeared on 8 / 9 / 08, eight years before Dylan won the Nobel Prize. The questions raised remain worth asking. It never fails to amuse me that the lines about Eliot and Pound in “Desolation Row” were analyzed at length by one of the premier close readers of our time, who may have vastly overestimated the extent of Dylan’s knowledge about Eliot and Pound.

Milton Glaser's portrait of Dylan is reproduced on the left.

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Bob Dylan is represented in the 2006 edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry with "Desolation Row" and this head note. We're curious to know how readers react to the inclusion of Dylan's work, the specific choice of "Desolation Row," and the statements made in the head note below. -- DL

Bob Dylan, b. 1941. The songwriter and singer was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, and spent much of his boyhood in Hibbing, near the Canadian border. He named himself after Dylan Thomas. The lyrics in three of his record albums from the mid-1960s –– Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde –– particularly reward close analysis of the sort given to demanding examples of modern poetry. Read on the page, independent of musical accompaniment or vocal delivery, "Desolation Row" may be his finest lyric. The critic Christopher Ricks, who had previously written books about Milton, Keats, Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, and Samuel Beckett, devoted a lengthy volume to Dylan’s Visions of Sin in 2004. Ricks analyzes a stanza in "Desolation Row" –– the one in which Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are "fighting in the captain’s tower" –– in relation to Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'' Archibald MacLeish once complimented Dylan on the same lines. "Pound and Eliot were too scholastic, weren't they?'' MacLeish said. "I knew them both. Hard men. We have to go through them. But I know what you mean when you say they are fighting in a captain's tower.'' Recalling MacLeish’s words, Dylan made no comment other than to allow that he liked Eliot, who was "worth reading,'' but disapproved of Pound's anti-American propaganda from Italy in World War II and never did read him

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 09, 2008 at 10:00 AM in Dylan Watch | Permalink

Comments

like many very talented people bob seems able to channel many voices and express them in a really pure way. he's not a deep thinker. he can just get into a vein. his song "joey," about the mafioso joey gallo, has no soprano-style irony. there's humor in that song, but it's not "knowing" humor. as is clear from his book entitled chronicles, bob can see what's good in so many different kinds of acts, from the royal teens to frank sinatra. there's nothing snobbish about him. yardbird parker had something of that too. if there was somebody really bad playing, he would say, "i see what you're trying to do," and he would sit in with them. btw: i will buy a mcdonald's happy meal (boy's or girl's, your choice) for anyone who can explain why charlie p. was called "yardbird." not bird, yardbird!
Posted by: | August 09, 2008 at 01:53 PM

I think it is perfectly appropriate to include Bob Dylan in an anthology of American Poetry, however, what should be included is one of Mr. Dylan's poems, not a song lyric. I think Dylan's poem "Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie" is a great American poem. You can find the text here: http://orad.dent.kyushu-u.ac.jp/dylan/lasthowg.html

A recording from 1963-64 of Dylan reading the poem is in on the "Original Bootleg Series Vol 1-3" release on Columbia Records.
Posted by: Stan Denski | August 10, 2008 at 07:32 AM

Saying he took his name after Dylan Thomas is incredibly slack journalism, i.e. utterly unsubstantiated drivel that's been repeated so often it's taken by fools to be something you don't even have to bother researching. (More plausible is the story that he was walking around NY with a little notebook full of song titles, and one day after the rain he opened it and part of the name of the song 'Candyland' had been obliterated by the rain, leaving only 'xxxdylanx').
I do think there's a rabble-rousing minority in the poetry world that's keen to include dylan, but the obvious problem is that words to a song aren't meant to stand alone as poetry. At least they've chosen a lyric that isn't augmented too radically by the music that goes with it, but i still think it's out of place. Poetry is meant to be enjoyed on the page, music is multi-media in nature. That said, what distinguishes dylan among vocal performers is that he approaches his work with a poetic eye.
Posted by: AndoDoug | August 10, 2008 at 01:22 PM

I think the inclusion of any number of Bob Dylan's works is more than appropriate. There are so many works to choose from, both in terms of poetic and musical merit. In particular, his lyrics coupled with the piano have created some extraordinary works of art. "Oh Mercy" has a few songs on it worth taking a look at.
Posted by: Amy | August 10, 2008 at 05:29 PM

Stan Denski's suggestion re. "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie" is a good one, but the distinction between song lyrics and poems is weak at best, in the history of English literature (Elizabethan sonnets, for example). Just take his best verse, song-lyric or otherwise, and he'll beat many's the long-included poet in the canon. Pick one, any one, from ""The Times They Are A'Changing" to ""Mr Tambourine Man" to " Go 'Way From My Window" (A perfect aubade!), you can't go wrong.
Posted by: John McLaughlin | August 10, 2008 at 09:20 PM

Have to disagree. The better the song, the worse the poem. Studying song lyrics as poetry is akin to studying the paintings of Van Gough from 4 X 6 black & white photographs. See: bad idea.
Posted by: Stan Denski | September 13, 2008 at 09:46 AM
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Comments

[Dave Read]

If I were the "Don" of the book sector of the academic-military-industrial complex, I would call Prof. Ricks "a good earner." But, I'm not, I'm a poet and a big Bob Dylan fan.

With the exception of Tarantula, published against his wishes, Dylan doesn't publish whatever poems he writes; only songs. It is sad that his worst lyrics are better than so much poetry published today - so much of it dribbling out of the 800 poetry mills established at colleges in the USA, since Blood on the Tracks!