Dylan--here's a piece written in 1965 re: what the college students and some of the literary giants of the day thought of him. I enjoyed reading these perspectives through the long lens of 50 years.
Unlike Lowell, Bellow, Mailer or any of the dozen or so other writers esteemed by the quarterlies, explained the students, Dylan, whose songs are mainly of social and personal protest, is writing about things they care about.
"We don't give a damn about Moses Herzog's angst or Norman Mailer's private fantasies," one earnest Brown University senior noted. "We're concerned with things like the threat of nuclear war, the civil-rights movement and the spreading blight of dishonesty, conformism and hypocrisy in the United States, especially in Washington, and Bob Dylan is the only American writer dealing with these subjects in a way that makes any sense to us. And, at the same time, as modern poetry, we feel that his songs have a high literary quality. As far as we're concerned, in fact, any one of his songs, like 'A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall,' is more interesting to us, both in a literary and a social sense, than an entire volume of Pulitzer Prize verse by someone like Robert Lowell."
And an unnamed literary critic: "I don't see Dylan as a writer of any consequence--he's simply a pop-culture figure," says one of the anti-Dylan critics. "Granted, he has an interesting imagination, but his ideas and his techniques are dated and banal--we've been through all this before in the thirties. Like most pop culture heroes, Dylan will soon be forgotten--he'll quickly become last year's vogue writer.
December 12, 1965
Public Writer No. 1?
By THOMAS MEEHAN
For the past three and a half years, since the death of William Faulkner, on July 6, 1962, American literary critics have been nervously scanning the horizon in search of a novelist or poet who can be definitely called the nation's Public Writer No. 1, in the way that Faulkner and, before him, Hemingway, answered to this title. Not surprisingly, the critics, gazing out of the windows of The Partisan Review, etc., have been keeping a close eye on who is being read by the country's college undergraduates, who are, after all, today's more selective readers as well as tomorrow's writers, professors of English and even critics for The Partisan Review. Thus, in intellectual circles from Berkeley to Philip Rahv's apartment, where all the talk has been of writers like Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, a number of jaws dropped noticeably a couple of weeks ago when an informal survey of students majoring in English at three prominent Ivy League colleges revealed that their favorite contemporary American writer is a 24-year-old folk-song writer, composer and singer named Bob Dylan.
Unlike Lowell, Bellow, Mailer or any of the dozen or so other writers esteemed by the quarterlies, explained the students, Dylan, whose songs are mainly of social and personal protest, is writing about things they care about.
"We don't give a damn about Moses Herzog's angst or Norman Mailer's private fantasies," one earnest Brown University senior noted. "We're concerned with things like the threat of nuclear war, the civil-rights movement and the spreading blight of dishonesty, conformism and hypocrisy in the United States, especially in Washington, and Bob Dylan is the only American writer dealing with these subjects in a way that makes any sense to us. And, at the same time, as modern poetry, we feel that his songs have a high literary quality. As far as we're concerned, in fact, any one of his songs, like 'A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall,' is more interesting to us, both in a literary and a social sense, than an entire volume of Pulitzer Prize verse by someone like Robert Lowell."
(The undergraduate vote was not, of course, unanimous. One Harvard unbeliever, for example, asserted that it was "absurd" to take Dylan's writing seriously.)
If Bob Dylan is, indeed, an emerging major literary figure, he will then have things going for him three ways, for he is already a leading figure in the American folk-singing world and, at the same time, a teen-age popular-music idol whose recordings of so-called folk-rock songs, a hybrid form of his own recent invention, like "Positively 4th Street" and "Like a Rolling Stone," have in the past few months frequently been nestled next to the Beatles numbers near the top of WABC's All- American Super-Hit survey. Folk rock, by the way, is nothing more than a folk song sung to a rock 'n' roll big-beat background, but when Dylan introduced this new form at the Newport Folk Festival and at an outdoor concert at Forest Hills last summer, singing for the first time to the electronic accompaniment of a blaring rock 'n' roll combo, he was roundly booed by folk-song purists, who considered this innovation the worst sort of heresy. "It's all music," drawled Dylan in reply, "no more, no less."
Surprisingly, a number of leading American literary critics profess never even to have heard of Bob Dylan, while, among those who are acquainted with his work, the critical opinion is sharply divided between those who don't take him in the least seriously and those who agree with the students that Dylan may well be an important new figure in American letters.
"I don't see Dylan as a writer of any consequence--he's simply a pop-culture figure," says one of the anti-Dylan critics. "Granted, he has an interesting imagination, but his ideas and his techniques are dated and banal--we've been through all this before in the thirties. Like most pop culture heroes, Dylan will soon be forgotten--he'll quickly become last year's vogue writer."
On the other hand, a pro-Dylan critic argued this way recently: "Dylan is taking poetry away from the academicians, Poetry, and the Y.M.H.A., and giving it back to the masses, which seems to me an extremely healthy development. Moreover, he is an interesting poet, even if he is a teen-age idol. After all, poetry began with Homer, wandering about reciting his verses to anyone who'd listen to them and, in a sense, stretching matters a bit. Dylan is a kind of 20th-century Homer, if however, 'Motorpsycho Nightmare' and the rest are scarcely 'The Iliad.'"
Dylan's fellow poets tend also to be somewhat divided in their assessment of him, as in the opinion of:
Stanley Kunitz--"I listen with pleasure to Bob Dylan, but I would term him a popular artist, a writer of verse rather than of poetry. All in all, though, I think the interest taken in him is a healthy sign, for there is no reason why popular art and a more selective, esoteric art can't cheerfully coexist. And popular art is the foundation on which fine art rests. Thus, the higher the level of taste there is in the popular arts, the more promising is the hope for the evolution of great fine art." Louis Simpson--"I don't think Bob Dylan is a poet at all; he is an entertainer--the word poet is used these days to describe practically anybody. I am not surprised, though, that American college students consider him their favorite poet--they don't know anything about poetry."
W.H. Auden--I am afraid I don't know his work at all. But that doesn't mean much--one has so frightfully much to read anyway." Among those who tend to agree with the pro-Dylan critics is Dylan himself, who has nothing but scorn for the American literary Establishment and who has not long ago had this to say to an interviewer: "The only thing where it's happening is on the radio and records. That's where people hang out. It's not in book form, it's not on the stage. All this art they been talking about, it just remains on the shelf."
And, finally, those writers and critics who refuse to take Dylan seriously might give some thought to the second verse of Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin," a song that enjoys immense popularity with the current college generation and has, in fact, become the somewhat subversive secret theme song of that generation:
Come writers and critics
Who prophecize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
FOR THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'
nytimes.com
Thomas Meehan is a writer who in the course of his assignments has learned to swing with, if not wholly subscribe to, the opinions of the young.
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