[Terese Coe]

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.

[Roger Slater]

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.

[Mark Granier]

...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.

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).]

[Roger Slater]

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":

My eyes refuse the cheering light,
Their orbs are veil'd in starless night:
Such pangs my nature sinks beneath,
And feels a temporary death.--

And Frances Sheridan (1724–1766), in The History of Nourjahad, has a character say:

"Your life," said he, "will be frequently interrupted by the temporary death of sleep."

http://www.wwnorton.com/nto/romantic...4/sheridan.htm

Nathaniel Hawthorne used the same phrase in The Haunted Mind:

Now comes the peal of the distant clock, with fainter and fainter strokes as you plunge further into the wilderness of sleep. It is the knell of a temporary death.

http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/hmind.html

And someone named AJ Davis wrote in the 19th century:

"True sleep is a temporary death of the body and a rest of the soul."

see http://www.dreamhawk.com/dyd-ch2.htm ]

Apparently, it is a familiar Islamic thought, as well.

In Islam, sleep is considered as a temporary death.

http://www.nmnonline.net/tenets/DREA...RSPECTIVE.html

A poet name Augustine Ohanwe also used the trope:

SLEEP
Sleep is a temporary death
Through which nature acquaints us
With the inevitable permanent sleep.

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:

After a hard day's work don't you look forward to some sleep? And is sleep not temporary death?

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.

[Janet Kenny]

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

[Mark Granier]

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!

[Roger Slater]

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.

[Daniel Haar]

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.

[wendy v]

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

[Mark Allinson]

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:



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