In Praise of a Poet Who Needs No Champion

A scene, a situation, a brief encounter or simply a chance word or passing mood triggers a flood of images and associations, which he writes down and sets to music. Inspiration? Songs are in the air. Bob Dylan simply breathes in inspiration and exhales songs.

Dylan writes in chains of flashing images. There is usually one such image in every verse, the tag line. Other poets and songwriters employ the same technique. What Dylan has is a unique ability to find precisely the right word—Twain's lightning instead of the lightning bug—that comes at you from odd, unexpected angles. "When you're lost in the rain in Juarez / And it's Easter time too / And your gravity fails / And negativity don't pull you through." No matter how many times you hear those lines, the word "negativity" always hits you from behind like the tiny locomotive coming out of the fireplace in the René Magritte painting.

Like all talented writers, Dylan has the ability to express what others only feel. "Ramona, come closer, / Shut softly your watery eyes / The pangs of your sadness / Shall pass as your sense will rise": a perfect description of that comforted and relieved state of mind. Dylan has emotional perfect pitch. That's why his lyrics invariably ring true.

He also has a profound understanding of human nature that goes beyond what is revealed in his lyrics. “She talks to all the servants about man and God and law / And everybody says she's the brains behind Paw / She's 68 but she says she's 54 / I ain't gonna work for Maggie's Ma no more.” The lyric is a neat little take on vanity. We chuckle at the humor and nod knowingly at the caricature. We're hip.

In "John Wesley Harding," Dylan tells us the situation in Cheney County was “all but straightened out.” When the hero of a song brings matters to a head, we have a rooting interest in the outcome that would otherwise be missing. It's like Michelangelo's God reaching out to awaken Adam with a touch of His finger. The mind of a visitor to the Sistine Chapel adds the spark of life that the painter cannily left out of the fresco. In both "John Wesley Harding" and Michelangelo's painting, human nature is at work on us whether we realize it or not.

Dylan's many ballads and sung stories are miniature novels or rather movies. The images flicker into view, always a step or two ahead of the listener's imagination, which races to catch up after being waylaid by some arresting image or catchy turn of phrase. Sometimes he moves in for a tight close-up ("Your cracked country lips / I still wish to kiss"). At other times, he widens the focus to include "every hung up person in the whole wide universe." And at other times, he uses a framing device (“only a pawn in their game”), like Hitchcock's long, high-angle shot of an attack in "The Birds" that puts human events in perspective.

Dylan wrote his share of Broadside ballads and “finger-pointing” songs that speak out against bigotry, hatred and injustice. Yet, his manner of doing so avoids simplistic answers and makes demands on the listener: “I can't think for you / You'll have to decide, / Whether Judas Iscariot / Had God on his side.”

In Dylan: An Intimate Biography, Anthony Scaduto writes, 'A comparison of the way Dylan and Phil Ochs each handled the murder of civil rights leader, Medger Evers, points [up Dylan's remarkable handling of the protest song]. Ochs, and everyone else writing the Broadside song, saw the killing as simply a story to be set to music....Dylan, however, handled it differently in Only a Pawn in Their Game. He immediately establishes that the bullet fired from ambush takes Evers' life, but from there he takes it several large steps forward. The man who fired the bullet is not to blame. He is only a pawn in the game in which the politician preaches to the poor whites that they're better than blacks, and the politician rises to power on his demagoguery while the poor whites remain “on the caboose,” at the bottom of the heap....They buried Evers “as a king” but when the man who fired the gun eventually dies, his epitaph will be that he was only a pawn in their game.'

Another example of Dylan's remarkable handling of the protest song is "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." His portrait of William Zantzinger in "The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll" is scathing but Dyan's finger is really pointed at the criminal justice system. (Dylan's jurisprudence is a subject of study.) In both songs, Dylan manages to indict the Establishment without implicating his audience. If you don't believe me, watch "Don't Look Back." Pennybaker's footage of Dylan singing "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" is the only performance in the film you don't want cut short. Other songwriters wrote protest songs too. He simply did it better than anyone else.

In "Blowin' In The Wind," Dylan went beyond the established bounds of the protest song. He universalized his message to include the listener, at whom he indirectly points a finger. “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?...How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?...How many times must the cannon balls fly before they're forever banned?...” Nine simple questions in all. The answer? The one Dylan gives is elusive and specific; and it leads to other questions involving the listener that Dylan pointedly refrains from asking. He simply leaves the unspoken questions hanging in the air for us to ponder, the answer blowin' in the wind. Few other songwriters or social critics could have managed such a balancing act so deftly.

Like Shakespeare, Dylan exhausts the possibilities of a subject. What could be added to the anti-war message of "With God On Our Side" or his put-down of the envious loser in "Positively 4th Street" or his generational anthem, "The Times They are A-Changin'?"

Dylan doesn't hold a mirror up to the world. He creates a colorful vision of it and invites us to compare the two. Which is real life and which is not is never in doubt. But like the Gypsy gal in "Spanish Harlem Incident," without contact with Dylan's poetry and songs, it's hard to tell if you are really real.

Dylan's songs aren't merely songs. They're touchstones. Rubbed and questioned, they never lose their luster or fail to dazzle. His greatest lyrics can stand the strain of even the most tortured interpretations, the lines stretching but never breaking, their elasticity and tensile strength seemingly infinite.

In Dylan's hands, clichés become more than clichés. Love becomes more than a “four-letter word.” He breathes life into a cliché, puts it on its feet and gives it a scene or two to play on the stage of the English language.

Like Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, Dylan has a language all his own. "Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?" Who besides Shakespeare could have written that line? "The Soul selects her own Society—Then—shuts the door—" Who besides Emily Dickinson could have penned that? “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.” One can't imagine anyone except Bob Dylan writing that line, much less setting it to music.

Dylan's titles are a study in themselves: "Blowin' In The Wind," "Like A Rolling Stone," "Ballad in Plain D," "Motorpsycho Nightmare," "It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry," "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," "From A Buick 6," "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "My Back Pages," "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," "Queen Jane Approximately," "Absolutely Sweet Marie," "Temporary Like Achilles," "Fourth Time Around," "Obviously Five Believers," "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," etc. With Dylan, the poetry starts before the songs actually begin.

No other 20th Century poet that I know of—and certainly no other songwriter—casts as long and large a shadow as Bob Dylan. Other great songwriters exist. They struggle to emerge from Dylan's shadow and rarely grow larger than life.

Dylan's enduring popularity is proof of his greatness as a poet/songwriter. More people know the words to "Blowin' In The Wind" than "America the Beautiful." The sun never sets on Dylan's music. It's heard 24/7—on radio and television, at the movies, in elevators, on iPods and YouTube. It's inescapable. Each new generation doesn't discover Dylan. It simply absorbs a consciousness of him from the wallpaper music at the supermarket and the mall.

Consciousness of Robert Frost or T. S. Eliot, say, gained through reading and study has it's rewards too. But you can't sing along with "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" or "The Wasteland" playing on the car radio. With Dylan you can. His poetry gets you where you live. It's visions of Johanna—not J. Alfred Prufrock or anonymous tramps at mud time—that keep the world up past dawn.

If Bob Dylan, the man, were to vanish as completely as Molière or blues legend Robert Johnson, his songs would survive without need of biographers, revivalists and anniversary celebrations to keep up interest in his work. The best Dylan songs are timeless—more than timeless. They exist, to use Norman Mailer's phrase, in the "perpetual climax of the present," where, for better or worse, we all live our lives in range of Dylan's raspy voice reminding us "there's no use in tryin' / T' deal with the dyin' / Tho I can not explain that in lines."

What Dylan has been able to put into lines surpasses anything else that ever got pressed into vinyl or passed around on the Web. You doubt it? Try this thought experiment. If it were proved that "Blowin' In The Wind" wasn't written by Bob Dylan but by one of his many disciples/imitators, it would still be a great song but it would somehow be diminished. Something would be missing from it. That something is Dylan's genius. Q.E.D.