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Bob Dylan: Song as poetry
the-tls.co.uk
I think he could stand pretty well on his ballads alone, and ballads, since Burns and Scott (and, even earlier, the anonymous "makers" collected by Percy and Child) are indisputably part of English-language poetry. Where does any anthology of English verse begin? Chaucer? No, with "Barbara Allen" and "Sir Patrick Spens." The ballad continues to hold its own in popular music, primarily in country and folk, and it also holds its own with contemporary poets. Most of the major English Romantics wrote them, and after them there are great examples from the Victorians and early moderns--Swinburne, Kipling, Yeats, Hardy, Noyes, Auden, et al. Two other contemporary balladeers who haven't been mentioned here are Lightfoot and Prine, both of whom I've taught in poetry classes. I could probably mention Mitchell, but she's more of a high modernist who toys with the ballad form. A lot of us came to poetry from listening to and performing song lyrics. Their words mean a lot more to us then than the "Great Poems" we were given that we couldn't understand, then. And those of us who rhyme can appreciate the brilliant rhymes in some songs; for me, the best (other than Gilbert) is Lorenz Hart. Tell a good story with a catchy melody and you've got "Knoxville Girl," "Lucille," "El Paso," "A Boy Named Sue," "Coat of Many Colors," and "Coal Miner's Daughter," just to mention a few. And you don't get tired of hearing them.
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