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   > Cohen’s claims to be poets, is that they achieved what their mentors   
   > 6failed to accomplish. They introduced a new audience to the world of   
   > poetry, an audience whose horizons were broadened and who contributed to   
   > a significant increase in the sales of poetry books. Rexroth   
   > acknowledged that “the importance of Dylan is that he is imitated right   
   > and left. It is a very important phenomenon that in the new-leisure   
   > society of barefoot boys and girls, poetry is dissolving into the   
   > community.”[22]   
   >   
   > The 1999 National Poetry Day, October 7, had as one of its principal   
   > themes the relation between poetry and song lyrics. Andrew Motion chose   
   > as his favorite lyric of all time the opening lines from Bob Dylan’s   
   > “Visions of Johanna”: “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks   
   when   
   > you’re trying to be so quiet.” (Incidentally, it is also Bono’s   
   favorite   
   > line from a Dylan song.[23]) The Poetry Society of Great Britain   
   > commissioned Roddy Lumsden to explore the relation between pop lyrics   
   > and poetry and between their respective “industries.” The project drew   
   > upon the musings of a disparate crowd of commentators, including Motion,   
   > who commented on Bob Dylan’s work. The general consensus was that pop   
   > lyrics have their own integrity within the much broader texture of   
   > music, image, performance, and “attitude.” There are exceptions to the   
   > rule, and occasionally a successful lyricist produces words capable of   
   > being read and divorced from their texture. In Motion’s view, Bob Dylan   
   > is one such exception who does not need to lean on the crutch of his   
   > guitar. Despite this, Dylan worked hard at the texture, consciously   
   > crafting musical forms to coincide with his obses   
   > sion with change.   
   >   
   > Very early in Dylan’s career Robert Shelton, the folk music critic of   
   > the New York Times, described him as “one of the musical-poetic geniuses   
   > of our time.”[24] The literary critic Frank Kermode caused a stir in the   
   > 1960s when he compared Dylan with Keats and Wordsworth.[25] Paul   
   > Williams described Dylan’s work as “great art.”[26] Leonard Cohen   
   > suggested in 1985 that Dylan “is the Picasso of song,” and in 1988 in an   
   > interview in the Musician Magazine, he again likened Dylan to Picasso in   
   > his “exuberance, range and assimilation of the whole history of   
   > music.”[27]   
   >   
   > The claim that Dylan was a great poet of his generation precipitated a   
   > heated debate to which critics and academics contributed. Many academics   
   > were disdainful of the claim, suggesting that Dylan was a self-conscious   
   > second-rate imitator of Jack Kerouac, who appealed to the feebleminded   
   > who knew nothing of poetry. Whatever the merits of the counterclaims, it   
   > cannot be denied that Dylan made poetry popular, elevated from its   
   > secluded shade in a corner of academia, into the horizon of a new and   
   > inquisitive audience, hitherto not renowned for its cultural and   
   > artistic discernment. Henrietta Yurchenco argued in 1966 that “if Dylan   
   > has done nothing else, he is responsible for the present widespread   
   > interest in 7poetry.” She went on to say: “He has given poetry a   
   > significance and stature which it has never had in American life.   
   > Furthermore, he is a bard—a singing poet in an ancient but thoroughly   
   > neglected tradition.”[28] Adrian Rawlings, commenting on Dylan’s 1966   
   > Australian tour, proclaimed that he had rescued poetry from obscurity   
   > “in a way that neither Eliot nor Pound nor the American poetry and jazz   
   > movement ever could.”[29]   
   >   
   > At about the same time that Bob Dylan was listening to American folk and   
   > blues he started reading Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Frank   
   > O’Hara. Dylan had come to lyric poetry through Woody Guthrie, who Billy   
   > Bragg has suggested is the best American lyric poet since Walt Whitman.   
   > In 1960, a friend in Minneapolis, Dave Whitaker, who is credited with   
   > having brought about Dylan’s first great transformation, from the   
   > reluctant university fraternity boy on the margins of the in crowd to   
   > one of the coolest men in town, is most likely to have introduced him to   
   > Kerouac and the Beat poets, particularly Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. It   
   > was at this time that Dylan read Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, the effect   
   > of which was to metamorphose him into a seasoned traveler with an   
   > Oklahoma accent, as well as a new past.   
   >   
   > In Greenwich Village the poetic influences were extended. Folk musician   
   > Dave Van Ronk stimulated Dylan’s interest in the work of the French   
   > symbolists. He particularly liked Rimbaud. Rimbaud was a rebel who   
   > wanted to reach a wider popular audience with his poetry, in which he   
   > questioned all types of establishment authority, including church and   
   > state. Like Woody Guthrie, he almost lived the life of a vagrant and   
   > drank very heavily. In addition, Rimbaud indulged heavily in marijuana   
   > and opium. He claimed that, in order to transform the poet into a seer   
   > or visionary, the senses must become disordered or disturbed by a   
   > prolonged process of disorientation. Blake, whom both Ginsberg and Dylan   
   > admired, expressed similar sentiments in more restrained terms: “The   
   > road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (from Proverbs of Hell).   
   > Dylan’s own well-documented drunkenness and excessive abuse of drugs   
   > coincide with the development of his abstract, almost surreal, poetic   
   > phase, or what he described himself as “hallucination . . . atery”   
   > songs. Van Ronk also got him interested in Villiers and Bertholt Brecht.   
   > Suze Rotolo, who appears on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan i   
   > n a pose almost identical to that in a photograph of Dylan and Caitlin   
   > Thomas on the same New York street, was involved with a group of actors   
   > who staged Brecht plays at the Circle in the Square Theatre in Greenwich   
   > Village. She helped out by painting the scenery for a production of   
   > Brecht on Brecht, and Dylan would go down and watch the six performers   
   > rehearsing the poems and the songs Brecht wrote with Kurt Weill. Rotolo   
   > has commented that Dylan was most affected by Lotte 8Lenya’s signature   
   > song, “Pirate Jenny.”[30] On the album The Times They Are A-Changin’,   
   > which includes the beautiful “Boots of Spanish Leather,” a lament on   
   > Suze’s lost love, her presence is also indirect: her connection to   
   > Brecht is felt in the structure and verse pattern of “The Lonesome Death   
   > of Hattie Carroll,” which is based on Brecht’s The Black Freighter.[31]   
   >   
   > Rotolo was widely read and introduced Dylan to such poets as François   
   > Villon, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Robert Graves, whom he met in London   
   > when the BBC flew Dylan over to appear in Madhouse on Castle Street.   
   > Graves wasn’t really interested in a pushy, scruffy little American   
   > trying to thrust his poetry under his nose. Dylan was deeply offended   
   > and went back to New York, describing Graves as an “old bastard.”   
   > Graves, in fact, had been very rude by turning to four musicians and   
   > starting a conversation while Dylan was singing “Hollis Brown.”[32]   
   >   
   > Dylan consciously tried to go beyond the rhyming of words that was   
   > typical of most song forms. He once said in an interview that he wrote   
   > his songs so that they could be read or recited even without the beat or   
   > melody.[33] As early as 1963 he found the song form restrictive, a   
      
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