Certainly it is not possible that a mutation in the human brain caused people to be able to take in poetry just as fast as it could be sung. Yet by the sixties it was accepted, at least by those who were willing to listen to Bob Dylan, that a Dylan song might contain such a welter of images, discontinuous narrative, curious metaphors, and phrases so hermetic as to exclude every listener except Dylan, that, even after hearing it through more than once, a listener might have only a vague notion of what it was about. Lines such as "My penthouse has your Arabian drum / shall I leave it now beside your gate / or, sad-eyed lady, shall I wait?" left listeners with nothing more definite than that the poetic I was addressing himself, in tones of hesitation and only tentative approach, to a mysterious woman. From other lyrics one could eventually figure out that while the sad-eyed lady had had a great many men figure in her life, none of them was capable of offering her the sort of total commitment and support she demanded, an attitude on her part which might explain the singer's hesitancy to approach her. Describing the sad-eyed lady's hangers-on, an unsavory lot, the singer concluded brutally, "Who among them do you think would ever carry you?" After giving out only this much information, the song retreats into obscurity, effectively excluding the listener from deciphering it in its totality. It would be hard to think of a more effective refutation of the idea that song lyrics must render up their meanings on the spot in order to satisfy.

The reaction to, for instance, the Dylan songs on Blonde on Blonde was an almost overwhelming concern with thematics. One group of listeners seemed most intent on determining whether the narrative voice or any of the characters in a given song were under the influence of drugs or using drug-induced experiences as referents. Such a concern was not only somewhat reductive, but hopeless, since the lyrics were so ambiguous that various sets of referents could be plugged in. Other special-interest groups sifted through Dylan lyrics seeking statements on generational conflict, attitudes toward women, possible calls to revolution, deification of new heroes, and so forth. Naturally, there were those concerned that listening too often to Dylan might cause the listener to abandon his moral standards. (p. 133)

The major arguments against giving Dylan the status of poet seemed to be that he reelaborated the same to-hell-with-you material too often and that many of his Rimbaud-evoking songs used mere obscurity to give an impression of something profound going on, while the images in the poems were really thrown together quite arbitrarily, without regard for the total rhetoric of the song.

Certainly a tiny stock of themes has never prevented non-singing poets from being classified as such. The charge of incoherence and randomness makes more sense, for some Dylan texts are remarkably loose and fragmented, failing to satisfy because they give the listener no clue as to how he is to fit the barrage of images into some coherent system. However, most of Dylan's songs make an approximate sort of sense. The poetic I usually takes such a markedly emotional stance toward his subject, whether one of contempt, despair, or longing, as to provide evidence of what is supposed to be going on.

The arguments against Dylan-as-poet seem to be trying to disqualify him by applying to his work standards not used in cases where the poet refrains from singing his texts. This double standard suggests that what really bothers these objectors to Dylan-as-poet is that he violates the distinction between poetry and song. Many poets fail to make their signs sufficiently clear or to impart to their works a unified feel, but Dylan was a poet of modern times spreading his unsimplified work with a song. (p. 134)