that are in his art. As he put it:
As you get older, you get smarter and that can hinder you because you try to gain control over the creative impulse. Creativity is not like a freight train going down the tracks. It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect. If your mind is intellectually in the way, it will stop you. You’ve got to program your brain not to think too much.12
A shrewd turn, this, the contrariety of “You’ve got to program your brain” and the immediate “not to think too much”.
T. S. Eliot, who knew that it “is not always true that a person who knows a good poem when he sees it can tell us why it is a good poem”, knew as well that “the poet does many things upon instinct, for which he can give no better account than anybody else”.13
Still, there are many admirers of Dylan who instinctively feel that adducing Mr Eliot when talking about Dylan is pretentious and portentous. So let me take an instance of a Dylan / Eliot intersection that is not of my finding (though I shall do a little developing). The Telegraph (Winter 1987) included a note:14
On a more literary level, had you noticed that Maybe Someday quotes from T. S. Eliot? In Journey of the Magi, Eliot has:
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
Later in the same poem there’s mention too of “pieces of silver”. So in Dylan’s lines:
Through hostile cities and unfriendly towns
Thirty pieces of silver, no money down
I remember the excitement I felt when I myself noticed Dylan’s debt (many pieces of silver) – and then the unwarrantable disappointment I felt when I later discovered from the Telegraph that I was not the first to discover it. Mustn’t be hostile or unfriendly about this not-being-the-first business. (The first shall be last.) But then the song is a tissue of memories of the poem. Here are a few more moments.
| Eliot | Dylan |
| an open door | breakin’ down no bedroom door |
| the voices singing in our ears | a voice from on high |
| it was (you may say) satisfactory | when I say / you’ll be satisfied |
| I remember | you’ll remember |
| all that way | every kind of way |
Take what you have gathered from coincidence, yes, but these are not coincidences, once you concede that the likeness of Eliot’s “And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly” to Dylan’s “Through hostile cities and unfriendly towns” goes beyond happenstance. Such a likeness, then, may give some warrant for taking literarily the art of the man who imagined Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower.
Note
I wrote about Dylan in the Listener in 1972 (1 June); I gave a BBC talk, Bob Dylan and the Language that He Used, in 1976 (22 March); over the years there were talks, some of them again for the BBC, and one that was printed in the Threepenny Review in 1990.15 Much of this, it’s all been written in the book, but there are some further thoughts about Dylan not included here, to be found in my essay on Clichés and in the one on American English and the inherently transitory, both in The Force of Poetry (1984).
The words of the songs are quoted here in the form in which he sings them on the officially released albums on which they initially appeared. The Index of Dylan’s Songs and Writings, at the back, is supplemented by a General Index and by a list, Which Album a Song is on.
The new edition of the lyrics, Lyrics 1962–2002, unlike the original Writings and Drawings and the later Lyrics 1962–1985, is apparently not going to include Dylan’s Some Other Kinds of Songs . . ., or his other poems and miscellaneous prose, so for these I give references to the earlier collections.
The discrepancies between the printed and the other versions (whether officially released, studio out-takes, or bootlegged from performances) are notable. Sometimes they are noted in the commentary here. Clearly they are of relevance to Dylan’s intentions or changes of intention, and I have to admit that sometimes one performance decides to do without an effect that another has, and that I had thought and still think exquisite – for instance, the plaiting of the rhymes at the end of If Not For You. Oh well. I think of Shakespearean revision. Sometimes I read (or rather, listen) and sigh and wish.
Songs, Poems, Rhymes
Songs, Poems
Dylan has always had a way with words. He does not simply have his way with them, since a true comprehender of words is no more their master than he or she is their servant. The triangle of Dylan’s music, his voices, and his unpropitiatory words: this is still his equilateral thinking.
One day a critic may do justice not just to all three of these independent powers, but to their interdependence in Dylan’s art. The interdependence doesn’t have to be a competition, it is a culmination – the word chosen by Allen Ginsberg, who could be an awe-inspiring poet and was an endearingly awful music-maker, for whom Dylan’s songs were “the culmination of Poetry-music as dreamt of in the ’50s & early ’60s”.16 Dylan himself has answered when asked:
Why are you doing what you’re doing?
[Pause] “Because I don’t know anything else to do. I’m good at it.”
How would you describe “it”?
“I’m an artist. I try to create art.”17
What follows this clarity, or follows from it, has been differently put by him over the forty years, finding itself crediting the words and the music variously at various times. The point of juxtaposing his utterances isn’t to catch him out, it is to see him catching different emphases in all this, undulating and diverse.
WORDS RULE, OKAY?
“I consider myself a poet first and a musician second.”18
“It ain’t the melodies that’re important man, it’s the words.”19
MUSIC RULES, OKAY?
“Anyway it’s the song itself that matters, not the sound of the song. I only look at them musically. I only look at them as things to sing. It’s the music that the words are sung to that’s important. I write the songs because I need something to sing. It’s the difference between the words on paper and the song. The song disappears into the air, the paper stays.”20
NEITHER ACOUSTIC NOR ELECTRIC RULES, OKAY?
Do you prefer playing acoustic over electric?
“They’re pretty much equal to me. I try not to deface the song with electricity or non-electricity. I’d rather get something out of the song verbally and phonetically than depend on tonality of instruments.”21
