Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared were called in the earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the forms of the flower and the fruit of latest time.
Percy Shelley, Defense of Poetry
Perhaps only two poets in the history of the world have ever lived up to the ideal of the poet as prophet and legislator expounded by Percy Shelley. One of those poets was Percy Shelley, and the other is Bob Dylan.
The comparison of Dylan and Shelley is not entirely off the wall. Both were Romantics, in the sense that, at least early in life, their prophetic vision was Utopian or at least idealistic. Both men held the average politician in deep disregard. Both men called for a radical change in the quality of relations between people. In some respects, the Dylan of recent years, more cynical than idealistic, and less evangelical in his fervent attempt to physically liberalize American society, might himself even be considered a ‘prophecy’ of what Shelley would have become had he not drowned in that storm off Leghorn at age 29.
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I am very much a late-comer to the music of Bob Dylan, having only discovered the richness of his music over the course of the past twelve months. But I am making up for lost time. For me, it began with the 1964 live album, which I told myself I did not like, but which nevertheless I found myself listening to again and again.
In particular the song, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” entered my dreams and for a long time haunted me throughout the day, until I had to start listening to another song in order to shake it. Then I watched Masked and Anonymous, where for the first time I heard “The Times They Are A-Changing” as sung by a little girl, as well as an aged Dylan himself singing such oddities as “Dixie” and a new version of “Diamond Joe.”
From there, Dylan became a steadily mounting obsession. I watched the Scorsese film, No Direction Home, and decided I even liked this guy, Bob Dylan, as well as his music. He is an unlikely star, an ugly poet without any of what most people would term “beauty” to his voice. His ordinariness appealed to me, and he seemed genuine in all respects. In one song on the album Slow Train Coming, he even says “You may call me Bobby, / Or you may call me Zimmy.”
Almost 20 purchased and illegally downloaded albums later, the obsession is nearly total.
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Born July 14, 1912, today is the 94th birthday of Woody Guthrie. The best tribute ever paid the man has been by Bob Dylan, who wrote “Song To Woody” about 1962.
Song to Woody
I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
Walking a road other men have gone down
I’m seeing a new world of people and things
Hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings.
Hey hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song
About a funny old world that’s coming along
Seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn
It looks like it’s dying and it’s hardly been born.
Hey Woody Guthrie but I know that you know
All the things that I’m saying and a many times more
I’m singing you the song but I can’t sing enough
‘Cause there’s not many men that’ve done the things that you’ve done.
Here’s to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too
And to all the good people that travelled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.
I’m leaving tomorrow but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hitting some hard travelling too.
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