[R. S. Gwynn]

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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.

[Julie Steiner]

I don't have anything intelligent to say. I just want to mention the gorgeous song Diamonds and Rust, which Joan Baez wrote about Bob Dylan.

(Off-rhyme can be very powerful stuff.)

[R. S. Gwynn]

Julie, that's a great album. It also contains Baez's version of John Prine's "Hello in There." I rate Prine pretty high as a songwriter.

[John Whitworth]

I seem to be stuck with a lot of Dylan groupies. I don't think it is churlish to suggest there is another view, that he is (as well as a talented songster) a self-regarding luvvie of a type that is all too common. There is no need to be rude if I put forward this view as strongly as I can. Lots of people hate Larkin and/or Auden, personal gods of mine, butI keep my temper. May I suggest a little proportion here. Dylan is not Shakespeare.

Why is the view that Cole Porter is better untenable? You're getting to be like a load of remoaners when we talk about Brexit. Surely yo are better than that.

Michael is allowed to be rude. At least he's rude to everybody.

Love you all. Buy my book.

[Mark McDonnell]

Hi John,

I hope I didn't write anything rude in the response that I addressed to you, I don't think I did. Or anything that suggested I was 'losing my temper'. I also didn't say that holding the view that Cole Porter is better was 'untenable', just that they were writing in very different styles.

Dylan groupies can get annoying though, I'll give you that.

Can we make up over our shared love of the great Larkin? I'm not so much of a Dylan fan that I don't always smile at Larkin's gentle dismissal of the song 'Desolation Row' in his newspaper Jazz review column: "an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words"

Cheers.

[Max Goodman]

If the literary value of songwriting is primarily in the lyrics, the best book I know about that is Stephen Sondheim's Finishing the Hat, the first volume of his collected lyrics, which I cherish not so much for the lyrics--most of which are in my head--but for his evaluation of previous generations of show-tune writers. He also includes, in both volumes, notes to many of his songs, giving enlightening accounts of how and why he wrote them as he did.

[Claudia Gary]

John,

Umm....It's a good thing there is not a single "self-regarding luvvie" among non-songwriter poets, right?

Also, I agree with you that "Dylan is not Shakespeare." But do you think maybe he has done the current-day equivalent of what Shakespeare did in his own time?

Then again, all this has probably been covered already, so I don't want to belabor it.

Claudia

[John Whitworth]

No, Claudia, I don't think Dylan is doing the equivalent of what Shakespeare did. There are plenty of singer/songwrters like Dylan. I, for instance, think Bert Jansch's 'Needle of Death' is better than anything Dylan did in that line.

But Shakespeare was not just like Marlowe and Jonson and Webster. In one play, say MacBeth which every Scottish boy has studied he produced more poetry than they managed in all their works put together.

Consider just one speech:

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life' but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is herd no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Sgnifying nothing.

No-one else can do anything like that.

[Roger Slater]

Which previous laureates for Literature were Shakespeare?

I wonder if there are physicists who object to the Physics prize being given to anyone who isn't as great as Newton?

[John Whitworth]

I don't follow you, Roger. I was responding to something Claudia said.

America's greatest poets of the 20th Century, Frost and Stevens, remain unhonoured. That seems to me a scandalous thing. Don't you think so?

Incidentally, it appears Tagore was a singer/songwriter, though I don't know anything else about him, so Dylan is not the first in that line to get the gong. O hell, old Zimmerman's OK. Like everybody else in the 1960s I used to have the LP and Mr Tambourine Man is jolly good.

After the 60s and the break-up of the Beatles, I rather lost interest in that sort of thing. I mean you can have 3 minutes of Mozart, that trio from Cosi Fan Tutte, for the same money.