Dylan is a Kerouac who can sing. He’s a Burroughs who put to music the great parade of the Beat generation, with its wild parties and naked lunches. He is what Allen Ginsberg said in describing his shock upon first hearing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall†in 1963, a song in which the accents and pacing, the abrupt changes in emphasis, the voyage to the very heart of words and the imagination all echo the best literature of the time—but with music as well!
Are we going to hold that against Dylan, charge him with the sin of having grafted the rhythms of the blues, soul, and country music onto those of the Bible, William Blake, and Walt Whitman? Why should we withhold from the trouper of the Never Ending Tour (more than 2,000 performances!) the dignity accorded without hesitation to the author of “On the Road�
It was Louis Aragon, I think, who said that setting a poem to music was like moving from black and white to color. Aragon, the poet sung by Léo Ferré and others, believed that a poem unsung was half dead.
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