Bob Dylan at the Azkena rock festival, 2010
"I just can't fit" sang Dylan in 1966, five years into a career that has now lasted four decades. Not fitting has been his hallmark. It's been the compulsion of his career. He has inhabited positions to oppose other positions. Then the contrary position has itself been subjected to opposition. It hasn't been a game or a fashion. It has been a drive-repeatedly frustrated, repeatedly renewed-for meaning: "Shedding off one more layer of skin/Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within," as he put it in a 1983 song. The relentless adoption and jettisoning of outlooks and stances means that looking back over 30-odd studio albums is to look back over a bewildering series of lyric personae. Dylan has articulated an acutely modern rootlessness.
There was the Dylan whose political songs in the early 1960s became anthems for the civil rights movement. The Dylan who warned an older generation that "Your sons and your daughters/Are beyond your command." Then, three major albums in two years, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966), saw him replacing caustic political verse with symbolist and surrealist lyrics, conjuring up a sense of imaginative alienation. Exhausting this mode he kept mutating, releasing in 1975 another classic Blood on the Tracks, which explores love and personal identity in a series of complex and elusive narratives. The "persecutor within" drove Dylan to mark the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s by recording three Christian albums (1979-81). The deliverances on the Christian albums were then quickly called in question in a 1983 song, Jokerman, where an astonishing blitz of imagery conspires to undermine all religious certainty. Estrangement, from the self and from the world, is still the vantage-point in his most recent album, Time Out of Mind (1997), except that now the emotional intensity is focused on an interrogation of unbelief and ageing.
His lyrics show the influence of blues, folk, American popular song, the Bible and symbolist and modernist poetry. While he is a great rhymester, his songs eschew the accentual-syllabic metres of standard poetry. But almost from the start people began debating how seriously we should take his art. The debate has turned on whether it qualifies for consideration on the same terms as conventional poetry. On whether Dylan has shown that popular song may bear a parallel linguistic sophistication and a comparable density of verbal meaning to conventional poetry.
In the mid-1960s the American novelist John Clellon Holmes argued that "Dylan reminds me of... the Brecht whose poems were meant to be sung. There is the same cold humour, the same ironic warmth, the same violent and splintered imagery... Dylan has returned poetry to song". A mid-1960s counter-statement to this kind of observation came from the British historian Eric Hobsbawm: "It is clear... that [Dylan] comes from that Reader's Digest mass civilisation which has atrophied not merely men's souls but also their language, confining the ordinary person to a mixture of stammering and clich?." The terms of the debate were thus established and in the intervening years various people have taken stands on one or other side. In the 1970s and 1980s the Cambridge English professor Christopher Ricks started applying his critical skills to demonstrate the ways in which Dylan's use of language puts him amongst the "best American poets." He pointed out that Dylan's art "does not traffic in clich?s," but re-energises the dead language of clich?: "Dylan... often grounds his wit, humour and pathos on an intuition as to how a clich? may incite reflection, and not preclude it, by being self-reflexive." Such academic approval (not confined to Ricks) has been complemented by the admiration of poets as diverse as Allen Ginsberg and Paul Muldoon (who termed Dylan one of the "great artists").
The opposition to Dylan as a serious artist bubbled up a few years ago when playwright David Hare, on BBC2's The Late Show, contrasted civilised culture with the tawdry emptiness of popular culture in terms of the opposition: "Keats versus Dylan." Hare's opinion was endorsed by AS Byatt, also on The Late Show, when she argued that the difference between Keats and Dylan is that in a Keats poem a reader may discover many layers of meaning. The case was the same as that made some 30 years earlier by Hobsbawm, a case grounded in the fear that value-distinctions are being eroded in contemporary mass culture. And because some people have spoken of Dylan, the rock singer, as a great artist, Dylan's songs and their high estimation have been taken as evidence of the threat now posed to western hierarchies of value. Dylan's work, it is asserted, should be fixed as vulgar: it doesn't fit "high" culture.
The problem for those who, like the present writer, admire Dylan's art, is that the attack on its superficiality seems to be based on a preconception about popular song in general rather than on any familiarity with what Dylan has written. This lack of knowledge is compounded with a misconception of what is being claimed for Dylan. The claim is precisely that his songs are qualitatively very different from the mass of popular songs. The claim is not that the typical verbal paucity of popular song (whatever its musical appeal) is of the same order as traditional poetry. It is, rather, that Dylan, perhaps uniquely, has invested songs for a mass audience with a verbal richness that can only be described as poetic. Qualitative distinction is precisely what is being maintained in claims that Dylan should be valued at the same level-even if they are not the same kinds of poet-as Keats, or Tennyson, or Verlaine, or Rimbaud.
An associated problem is that to attempt to demonstrate the richness-the many layers and nuances-of a majority of Dylan songs, would take more space than is available on a television show or, for that matter, in a piece of this length. One would want to show how, in songs like Tangled Up in Blue (1975) or Brownsville Girl (1986), beneath what at first appears a coherent surface story, Dylan uses fragmented narrative, shifting personal pronouns and indeterminacies of reference, to explore the dissociations and instabilities of personal identity in the modern world. One would want to attend closely to the way in which Dylan's sense of the apocalyptic (from "A hard rain's a-gonna fall," in the 1960s, through "It's the last temptation, the last account,/The last time you might hear the Sermon on the Mount,/The last radio is playing...", in the 1980s) permeates both his picture of society and his vision of personal ends. Or, one would need to examine in detail how Dylan's use of Biblical imagery in the post-Christian Jokerman is not only ambiguous but about ambiguity. The final stanza of the song alludes to Revelations ("a woman... upon a scarlet coloured beast") as it pictures an eruption of evil, the birth of an Antichrist. But in the closing lines ultimate outcomes are left radically uncertain as the Christ-like figure of the Jokerman responds with an equivocal lack of response. The Christ-figure may rise magnificently above or may be culpably indifferent to a fallen world:
It's a shadowy world, skies are slippery gray,
A woman just gave birth to a prince today and dressed him in scarlet.
He'll put the priest in his pocket, put the blade to the heat,
Take the motherless children off the street
And place them at the feet of a harlot.
Oh, Jokerman you know what he wants,
Oh, Jokerman you don't show any response.
Or, one would want to discuss, in detail, Dylan's numerous explorations of the human moral sense. In the 1989 Oh Mercy album, for example, he has lines which question the idea that human beings have any capacity for morally pure judgement:
Preacher was talkin', there's a sermon he gave,
He said every man's conscience is vile and depraved,
You cannot depend on it to be your guide,
When it's you who must keep it satisfied.
St Paul may have said that the conscience of "the defiled" is itself defiled, but at least he allowed that "unto the pure all things are pure." Dylan's darker vision is that there is no such thing as purity, or no such thing as a reliable faculty of conscience for anyone. Conscience is, rather, complicit in the evil that it judges. The conscience shares in the interest of the ego.
One would need, in short, to read the body of Dylan's work as closely as any conventional poetry is read. Not, of course, that all Dylan's lyrics or song-poems would demand this kind of detailed reading. There are lexically weak Dylan lyrics (though sometimes they are quite deliberately so, which makes all the difference). But the proportion of unimportant Dylan lyrics is no greater than the proportion of thinner verse in many traditional poets' canons. (We don't, for instance, remember Tennyson because he wrote "Minnie and Winnie/ Slept in a shell/Sleep, little ladies!/And they slept well," or dozens of other slight pieces.) As has happened with the work of recognised poets, one of the things that is needed is a good selection from the many hundreds of Dylan songs.
Yet even if we allow that familiarity with Dylan's songs forces-at least to an open mind-a recognition that his art is far from shallow, there remains the problem of knowing where, in the sanctuary of serious art, Dylan might be situated. Because he performs his work-some would demur at the word "sings," but I'd restate the old adage that Dylan can't sing like Picasso can't paint-it is the performance which imparts the musical dimension to a Dylan lyric and not the intrinsic metrical pattern as in ordinary poetry. The singing imparts its own-subtle, various, and powerful-expressive dimension. Listening to Highway 61 Revisited, Philip Larkin found himself "well rewarded" by Dylan's "cawing, derisive voice." There have been many valuable studies of the musical traditions-most significantly the blues-which Dylan draws on and expands in his performances (most recently and notably, Michael Gray's book Song and Dance Man III). At the same time, the sheer verbal complexity of many of the songs sends one back to the printed rather than the performed text in order to begin any serious understanding of the words. Dylan's work doesn't exactly fit within literary studies and it can't be completely appreciated outside of them. If he were to be described as a "literary" figure, which so far he certainly hasn't been (and which he himself would probably resist), it would have to be on something like the terms provided by Ezra Pound when he observed that the Provençals or troubadours triumphed "in an art between literature and music" and that the Elizabethans also achieved "a poetry that could be sung." Elizabethan song-poetry is studied today in the universities, the words of the lyrics habitually being taken in isolation from their performance. The same happens, of course, in the study of plays, where the text printed in a book is frequently regarded as the object of study, even though no one is ever in any doubt of the need always to return to the text defined in performance as affording the full range of expressive possibilities.
The crucial thing about the claim that Dylan's song-poetry should be approached in a comparable manner to conventional poetry is that the claim does not represent a capitulation to cultural relativism. It is not an argument for the assimilation of serious art to the levelling ideology of cultural studies, but an assertion of the need for informed, unprejudiced judgement. The terms of the debate about Dylan's work may not, in fact, be so different from those which defined the early reception of Keats himself. In 1818 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, a power in its day, characterised Keats as one "without logic enough to analyse a single idea, or imagination enough to form one original image, or learning enough to distinguish between the written language of Englishmen and the spoken jargon of Cockneys." Look where he is now.
