About Bob Dylan and his sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/arts/music/14dyla.html?ex=1158379200&en=389276ea528693bd&ei=5 087%0A

'“More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours,” the 65-year-old Mr. Dylan sings..'

Oh, Bob..more frailer?..dear, dear.

Regards, Maz

I've been listening to all the early Bob Dylan a lot lately, and it isn't anything new, one might say: many of the early songs have melodies "appropriated" from traditional folk songs.

Too bad there wasn't a BMI or ASCAP back in the 1700s, no?

Well, as the saying goes, good poets steal; great poets shag you as well.
David

Every few years I give in to temptation and buy the currently new Dylan album, try to listen to it, and yell, "Screwed again!" This is the man who created Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks... even Infidels and Empire Burlesque!
Richard

Creative re-cycling, I call it.

And applaud it.

I agree with V.W. - “all literature is one mind.”

If writers like Willy S. can rip off nearly every plot he used, and re-cycle passages from Golding's Ovid, etc., why can't Bobby do it too?

It's not "what" but "how".

And apart from some obvious heart-grippers I was too busy for Dylan when he was Dylanning.

How does Dylan's case differ from Leonard Cohen's case?
On Musings appears a Cohen piece clearly derived from a medieval Jewish prayer recited every Yom Kippur . Not surprising: Cohen was raised very strongly connected to Jewish community, liturgy and his roots. The medieval piece is, as Daniel pointed out, strongly connected to Ecclesiastes (CH.3). Those ideas no doubt appear in earlier works too. Do we know that Timrod hasn't reworked commonly used phrases of his time? Maybe I just haven't looked well enough, but I never saw Cohen specifically acknowledge sources -- in fact, many writers/artists allude to / show influences of... etc -- what is the difference here?

bugger! where are they when you need the pile reworked?

I find this story silly. What Dylan "stole" ar about six two-word phrases that weren't original when Timrod wrote them. He added them to hundreds and hundreds of his own words. If any of us were that famous, an exegesis could be made to prove that we "stole" from others as well.

Of course the folk tradition permits writers to use certain community melodies, as it were, that are part of the canon. It's almost like a form. I don't steal from others who wrote sonnets before me if I choose to write a sonnet.

It's worth pointing out that many of Dylan's best melodies are entirely original, of course. I've not yet had a chance with the new album, but Time Out Of Mind was a stunning work of genius, as good as his best work. To pick just one personal favorite, "Trying To Get To Heaven" is breathtaking and moving both musically and lyrically.

Seree,

You say How does Dylan's case differ from Leonard Cohen's case? On Musings appears a Cohen piece clearly derived from a medieval Jewish prayer recited every Yom Kippur. Your clearly is the difference. There is no hiding the debt Cohen has, whether or not any particular reader recognizes it.

Best,
Marcia

Edit: Cohen's title, too, sends off those who care to find the original.

[This message has been edited by Marcia Karp (edited September 15, 2006).]

When I was in what would now be called pre-school (then tiny tots) we sang
"Morning has Broken" which many years later appeared as a hit created by Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam. I never heard credit given to the original composition.

---
I've just Googled and it turns out to be poem written by Eleanor Farjeon. I don't know the origin of the lovely melody:

Eleanor Farjeon
Here is the background. I never heard it mentioned when the song was a hit:
Melody of Morning Has Broken
Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited September 15, 2006).]

Julia A. Moore had better watch out!

Sam,
You'll have to explain that crptic message. I Googled Julia but need to know more--as forum crits like to say.
Why will Julia A. Moore need to watch out?
Janet

Jest a poem.

`````````

Dylan is about one man’s fist
in the lightning sky.
Allen Ginsberg


Is about:
with apologies to Ginsberg, Yeats, and Rosen

The infant is about trading a body of water
for land, club footed,
black-eyed, blue toed,
a deuce in the hand
and an ace in the hole,
mad as the mist and snow.
The hand
is about Michelangelo.
The candle is about eating your curds
to find your way.
Faith is about needles and hay.
Gymnastics
is about sticking it. Poe
is about somebody finally getting up
to answer the door.
Déjà vu is about saline
seeping into the boat.
Fear is about fava beans and a nice chianti
subverting the form of the jungle snake.
Nature is about secrets, coves, sub
species, megaphones, healing balms,
and dispassionate devastations.
War
is about nature.
The womb is about aestivation.
Vice is about stalling for time.
The toddler is about knowing
the world by cramming everything
into the mouth.
Youth
is about spitting it out.
Passion is about death-
defying concentration.
Dickinson is about time.
Hopkins is about dragonflies.
The sage is about the mountain
high. The spine
is about bearing weight.
Old age is about bones.
The brain is about the size of the hand-
held blank slate. Dylan is about thieving,
weeding, and you deciding
what the weave is all about.
Beethoven is about scent.
Beaudelair is about the throat.
Death is about the intimacy
of distance,
the rowing of the glass boat,
secret coves, and dispassionate
devastations
mad as the mist and snow.






[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited September 15, 2006).]

And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are fighting in the captain's tower...

Janet, yes, Eleanor Farjeon should have been given more credit for the lovely poem "Morning has broken." Tho I'm not implying that Cat Stevens didn't give her derit--perhaps he did.
I feel as if I've always known it was by her, though not sure why--perhaps it was in the modern hymnal used by my convent school's nuns in the seventies, and her name caught my eye because I already loved her children's books, like Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field...I don't remember now.

Anyway, according to my Episcopal Hymnal, the melody is called Bunessan, and is a Gaelic melody that was harmonised by Alec Wyton, b.1921.

This is one of the loveliest marriages of words and music that I know. And the poem captures a special, early-morning-in-an-English-garden feeling that I used to have in my English childhood, on that sort of morning...

Christine

Janet, if Dylan is indeed plagiarizing from a poet as bad as Henry Timrod, Julia A. Moore (adequately parodied by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn) may be next. Or, for that matter, James Whitcome Riley or Edgar Guest.

Samm
Julia has come back to me, I had tried to forget.

Ho capito.
Janet

PS: My keyboard double MMed you, but I rather like it in the context of Julia.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited September 20, 2006).]

I would stop short of accusing Dylan of plagiarising Timrod, but I agree with Marcia on the difference between Cohen's song and (what I've read of) Dylan's. Assuming Dylan is aware of what he's done, and that it isn't an unconscious application of that Civil War stuff 'locked' in his head, what on earth would be the problem with an acknowledgment?

BTW I also believe Eliot should have acknowledged Madison Cawein for The Wasteland, even though Cawein's poem of the same title (minus definite article) is far less innovative or interesting.

Mark, your post sounds entirely reasonable to me.

Timrod may well be a terrible poet (I've read only the news article, not his work), but apparently he was good enough to make a splash in Dylan's brain.

I don't see anything for Dylan to acknowledge. A handfull, at best, of non-descript and unoriginal words and phrases that weren't original when Timrod used them to begin with? Was Timrod the first person ever to rhyme flower and hour? The first to call flowers frail? Dylan "took" nothing distinctive from Timrod, only, at best, the echo of a few stock phrases, which he used for entirely different meanings and purposes. I daresay that most poems at Erato could be "proven" to use at least as many phrases and words used by other poets as Dylan has used from Timrod, without any allusions intended.

Nah. Parody is a different thing entirely. If Dylan was parodying Timrod, fair enough, but was he? Doesn't look like it to me (though I'd have to hear the song). Twain's parody, on the other hand, was presumably recognised as such, as is Wendy Cope's nursery version of Eliot.

[This message has been edited by Mark Granier (edited September 21, 2006).]

I did some Googling to see if my sense is correct that the phrases Dylan "stole" from Timrod are really not all that definitely Timrodian. Here are some preliminary observations.

The exact phrase "hidden pain" turns up 33,900 times on Google. There's even a website called hiddenpain.com. So I conclude that Dylan either stole it from Timrod, or stole it from 32,899 other original wordsmiths. Yes, Dylan and Timrod both rhymed it with "explain," but I'm hoping you'll agree that this is a familiar rhyme pairing and that Timrod doesn't have dibs.

I think the most distinctive and original-sounding phrase that Dylan is accused of stealing from Timrod is "temporary death," which Dylan and Timrod (I think) both likened to sleep. (I'm sure no one here will be concerned that Timrod and Dylan both rhymed it with "breath," since every rhyming poet and songwriter who ever lived has rhymed breath and death). It turns out that there are well over 10,000 websites in which others have likened sleep to "temporary death," including many religious oriented sites, blogs, ranters, poets, and major literary figures.

For example, in a Byron translation of Catullus' "Ad Lebiam": And Frances Sheridan (1724–1766), in The History of Nourjahad, has a character say: http://www.wwnorton.com/nto/romantic...4/sheridan.htm

Nathaniel Hawthorne used the same phrase in The Haunted Mind: http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/hmind.html

And someone named AJ Davis wrote in the 19th century: see http://www.dreamhawk.com/dyd-ch2.htm ]

Apparently, it is a familiar Islamic thought, as well. http://www.nmnonline.net/tenets/DREA...RSPECTIVE.html

A poet name Augustine Ohanwe also used the trope: http://www.poemsofsoul.com/poemsbyAugustineOhanwe.htm

There are thousands of other uses of the same phrase by others I've never heard of. Here's one example: http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpage...2-2005-001.htm

*
As far as the "precious hours"/"frail flowers" is concerned, Timrod likened "logic" to frail flowers, and Dylan likened precious hours to frail flowers, so there's an obvious difference. Not even the same thought is being expressed. And certainly flowers/hours is a familiar enough rhyme to belong to no one, or to everyone. So I doubt that this "similarity" of phrasing even proves that Dylan was familiar with Timrod. In isolation, it certainly doesn't, and if the phrase, in isolation, owes no debt, one's infernce from other factors that Dylan knows Timrod's work should be irrelevant. In Google, the exactly phrase "precious hours" turns up 195,000 times -- so Dylan ought to be accused of triteness and lack of distinctiveness, perhaps, but not of taking a specific phrase from someone who used it over 100 years ago. And well over 21,000 webpages speak of "frailer" and "flowers" in the same breath.

*

As far as wisdom growing up in strife, my conclusion is that Dylan did in fact pick this familiar thought up from Timrod, since I cannot find any specific uses of the phrase other than Dylan and Timrod. This, alone, however, is an unstriking enough phrase or "borrowing" that I don't think any poet or songwriter can claim not to have done something similar or worse. I find it inconsequential. Others may differ. The thought, however, is not original to Timrod, and the expression is not, to me, all that distinctive. At any rate, I doubt, if this were the only Timrod/Dylan correlation, anyone would be talking about it.

Did any of you like the songs before you discovered he was naughty boy?
Janet

Roger, I agree with much of what you're saying; many of the rhymes and phrases are nothing extraordinary. But you're overlooking one important consideration. It's not the phrases or words themselves, but the combination of all of them on one album, and if even one phrase was consciously lifted/borrowed, then why not just acknowledge it? However, rereading the samples in the article I really do wonder if Dylan was even conscious of his borrowings (if that's what they were).

Apart from this, and much more importantly, I'm looking forward to actually hearing some tracks!

Mark, but the "combination" is also nothing extraordinary. There are only four examples of the "borrowings" that I have read about, and each of them is from a different Dylan song. It's not as if there were twenty or thirty of them, or they clustered in an unlikely way. Plus, as I think I've shown, three of the four aren't even genuine "borrowings." Did Timrod "borrow" the phrase "temporary death" from Sheridan? Did Hawthorne? It's not as if any particular writer invented these words. If Dylan had used much longer phrases, I could see the criticism, but generally one doesn't "steal" from another writer simply by using words that the other writer also used, or even two-word combinations. I guess I just don't get the pseudo-controversy here.

About the songs, I haven't had a chance yet to sit down and give them a careful listen, but people I know have told me the album's quite good and I hope I'll soon be in a position to agree. I'm certainly predisposed.

Here is a review that contains some clips from Dylan's new album, if anyone wants to get a "taste": http://www.slate.com/id/2148563/

Whether or not he has crossed into stealing, Dylan has made some great music: "Highway 61...", "Blood on the Tracks", "Desire", "Time Out of Mind". Quite astonishing, actually.

I think Dylan has always been brilliant at absorbing, embodying, borrowing, and still sounding just like him.
What influence, or observation and listening
is meant to do, I think. Ya gotta get in to get out.

I think of Keats, and his musings on the poet, and non
personality.

Bob, Mark, and others, the album doesn't disappoint.
He just keeps going, just keeps finding ways to get
through to the genuine, that guy. Here's to 'im,
wendy

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...inson/BDOZ.jpg


April 19, 1966, Melbourne Festival Hall.

I was only 19.

What a concert!

Half the audience got up and left when he started the electric set, as was the tradition in the early days.

(silly old folkie farts!)

That was when Bobby looked like this:

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...llinson/BD.jpg

I haven't heard the latest yet, Wendy, but I will get it soon.