[In the following essay, Lindstrom calls for a reevaluation of conventional thinking about the differences between the language of poetry and the language of popular songs, crediting Bob Dylan with initiating a trend in popular music toward the composition of more complex lyrics.]

There is certainly much to remind us that poetry was once something for people to sing to one another. We use words that hark back to the old kinship between poetry and song: canto, cantico, lyric, sonnet (little song). Yet we must point out to literature students that the ballads frequently singled out as sung poetry, were by no means the only poetic form to be communicated in this manner. Indeed, it seems difficult to impress this fact on our own minds, so accustomed are we to the idea that poetry is poetry and song is song. As is well known, when printing techniques allowed individual readers to go off alone, each with a copy of a poem to pore over in silence, poetry lost its old reliance on song as a means of transmission and settled into its on-the-page existence. But how permanent was this rift?

Many of us grew up with the assurance that song has lyrics—that is, that it has words which must have the feature of singability but not the sort of complex elaboration one would demand from a literary text—and that a book of poetry has poems—complexly developed works which if sung to a person would leave him with nothing but a tangled blur of images in his head and which must be studied at length and in silence. We have in recent years had our categories challenged. There can be a study entitled The Poetry of Rock (1969), on rock lyrics as a form of poetic expression. But one can scarcely imagine what sort of analysis might be perpetrated using for texts the words to rock and roll of the late fifties or early sixties. A good many people were startled to find Bob Dylan appearing in listings of favorite poets among college students. Now one can buy a record, pull out a sheet with the lyrics printed on it, and read something which appears to have all the features of poetry: innovative metaphors, surprising imagery, well-employed metonymy—in short, every characteristic except that of being presented to the world as poetry. A rock singer today may be a published poet, as in the case with Patti Smith, who was surprised to find herself singing rock only because, while she knew her poetic expression would eventually be triumphant, "I just didn't know it would have anything to do with my throat."

One might be surprised enough to find such demanding texts on records, which, after all, can be played repeatedly, allowing the listener to go back over a song somewhat as he would go over a poem. It is more startling to hear poetic texts played over the radio, where they are heard through once and gone, until listener and song happen to meet again. Thus we must abandon our conventional notion that poetry cannot normally be sung, that the compression of language and complex elaboration which make it poetry also make it too demanding to be taken in through the ear. Nor does it make sense, in the face of such occurrences, to continue to think of song lyrics as a form of verbal expression approximately on a level with football cheers, political slogans, anonymous letters, and other sometimes cleverly done but not very exalted forms.

Such a distinction held up well enough when one went from on-the-page "real" poetry straight to the ever-at-hand consolations of a reassuring, innundating spew of AM noise. There, words were worked around such well-known topics as the avowed intention to acquire a new love and thus forget the previous one; declarations of undying loyalty to rock and roll; the beloved who did not even know that the poetic I existed; and the possibility of partying for unbounded periods of time, for example, around the clock. However, such a song-poetry distinction is blurred by turning on the radio and hearing, say, Judy Collins singing Leonard Cohen's reworkings of such Biblical themes as Abraham and Isaac.

Naturally, not everything sung before Dylan was simplified for the ear's benefit. In the early twenties, Edith Sitwell presented Facade at the Aeolian Hall in London—at least one interesting example of poetry-as-song which neither antedates Gutenberg nor follows after Dylan. While sung-chanted, the work was not made less complex in the interests of accessibility to listeners. In fact, her poems were already written when, as Osbert Sitwell recounts the genesis of the work, the Sitwells became fascinated with the idea of making poetry abstract in the way sculpture and painting were abstract. Osbert Sitwell explains: "A young musician, William Walton, was then sharing a house with us, and we decided together that he should set the poems to music and that they should be presented in as abstract a manner as possible." Here Sitwell seems to be positing as an advantage the supposed problem with singing poetic texts, that a good deal of what was sung would be lost on the hearer, who could only be expected to assimilate so much at a time. The first performance of Facade evidently had the intended effect of becoming abstract by frustrating the listener's attempts to grasp the poetic text in its entirety, determine its rhetorical thrust, and savor the use of language. However, the audience which experienced this abstract effect did not find it much to its liking, and according to Sitwell, "At the end, my sister was warned not to leave the shelter of her dressing room until the crowd had dispersed, or she might meet with injury."

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.

Much concern was being expressed over the various sorts of damage over-Dylanization might cause through purely thematic means, little over the implications of his implied poetics. For instance, one did not hear anybody worrying that Dylan might deform a generation of young people by convincing them that inaccessible poetry was the only authentic mode of expression and making them distrustful of all poets who wrote in an open, clear style, nor that an adolescent who listened to Dylan might be forever stunted in his ability to appreciate or produce tightly structured literary works, leading to a future society in which all poetic forms except the ramble would atrophy away.

Perhaps the only question to be raised concerned with the implied poetics of Dylan's work was the matter of whether, in fact, Dylan ought to be called a poet. Since no very good definition of the word poet could be produced, it was another one of those answerless literary debates along the lines of whether literature can ever change society, whether innovative poets are worthier than those who rework traditional forms to make them fresh, and whether there can be a literary work without ideas.

Such questions are no less vigorously debated for being answerless. 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 nonsinging 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 Dylans's songs make an approximate sort of sense. The poetic Iusually 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.

One interesting aspect of the acceptance of lyrics that are complex is the retrospective attitude of those who comment on the lyrics they grew up with, lyrics not merely simple of elaboration but downright simple-minded. One common contention is that the near-inanity was purposeful serving an important function in terms of the rhetoric of the song. As an instance of this rhetoric-of-banality explanation, we have Neil Sedaka reminiscing in the pages of Rolling Stone about the genesis of one of the more spectacularly mindless songs penned, "Oh, Carol." Sedaka remembers that his lyricist submitted his work with the preface, "I'm embarrassed, it's terrible." Sedaka, though, who understood something about how a song lyric works its persuasion on the listener, said, "This is perfect, it's just what I want: a simple, ordinary layman thing that will appeal to all the Carols."

A slight variant of this proposed explanation holds that the Cro-Magnon character of some lyrics had to do with the cultural function of rock, that is, its alternative to an overintellectualized, too analytical way of regarding the world, the one being urged upon young people by schools and parents. This being the case, productive metaphors or memorable turns of phrase in the lyrics would spoil the alternative by causing the reader to think, or to perceive things in a new way, as poetic use of language is meant to do. The proponents of this point of view are many and tend to speak of rock monuments of antithought using terms such as "straight from the gut" or "raw energy" or "pure refreshing raunch."

One might well wonder whether the current reworking of no-brains rock into such satirical forms as the musical Grease and the group Sha Na Na could not be due partly to acute embarrassment over having spent large amounts of one's adolescent time and funds on a music which now sounds amazingly like nothing. By playing the same music in a sophisticatedly burlesque spirit, one can make it seem to have been a manifestation of the aesthetics-of-excess rather than the not-too-deserving object of straightforward admiration. Of course, whether or not such rewriting of cultural history is actually taking place, and whether those who attend Grease are really atoning for their past sins of taste, must remain a matter for speculation.

We can say, though, that while very simple lyrics may always be written, a change has taken place in many listeners' attitude toward song lyrics. The words to many of the songs played on what are vaguely called "progressive rock stations" are written with a complexity one could not have thought possible a few years ago. Nor is it possible to explain away the change by such ad-hoc explanations as that the complexity is a sort of smoke screen to avoid censorship, or that every one of the listeners is so stoned that even lyrics of the sort that rhyme arms with charms and heart with torn apart would be inaccessible to them. Censors are not apt to care about progressive stations, and even a sober pedantic listener can tell that the language pouring out of his radio is full of literary devices, often quite well employed. The long-standing distinction between the easy language of songs and the demanding language of poetry is today no longer such a valid one.