The master poets that inspired the work of Bob Dylan
When Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, it transcended the world of literature and poetry to include the work of musicians. Some critics argued that musical works ought to be exempt from the Prize. The poet Robert Lowell had previously said that Dylan wasn’t a poet because he “leaned on the crutch of his guitar”.
Yet Dylan’s work is masterful, so it is unsurprising that the Nobel Prize committee eventually turned the most influential folk musician of all time. Dylan’s tunes always tell stories of everyday life; they are tales of a thousand heartbreaks, a thousand losses, and a thousand triumphs.
As such, Dylan’s reputation as a poet ought to be recognised by the wider public; he should sit comfortably among some of the medium’s great. There are several poets who seemed to have inspired Dylan throughout his career, beginning with Charles Baudelaire.
Baudelaire was a 19th Century French poet who felt that same dissatisfaction with the middle class that Dylan felt. He also filled his poems with visions that were beyond the human realms of understanding, say in ’Anywhere Out of this World’, where Baudelaire writes: “At last my soul explodes, and wisely cries out to me: ‘No matter where! No matter where! As long as it’s out of the world!’. Perhaps this is echoed in the ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ line, “With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves”.
Another 19th Century poet who seems to have influenced Dylan is the legendary American writer Walt Whitman. Whitman appears to have been a proto-1960s character. On the front of his Leaves of Grass, he appears open-shirted and unshaven – a far cry from the style of the times and something that we could easily imagine Dylan in the pose of on one of his album covers.
Andre Breton is likely to be another of Dylan’s poetic influences. Breton was another French poet, though this time from the 20th Century, and was one of the central figures of the Surrealist movement. Breton frequently used the erotic imagery of women in his poems, and similar themes are often found in Dylan’s most romantic yearnings.
Any mentioning of the poets that inspired Bob Dylan would not be complete without discussing the Beatnik movement, and one particular poet is Allen Ginsberg, who Dylan met on several occasions and befriended. In ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, Dylan takes the imagery from Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ – “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection” – and turns it into “ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken”.
Finally, it is worth noting the influence of Langston Hughes, the 20th Century poet who is noted for bringing jazz and black art forms into the world of poetry. This would largely influence the forthcoming beatnik scene. Langston Hughes would almost rap in some of his poems, which is echoed in the Dylan classic ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.
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