Songs and poems are different things
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Jan. 15, 2025 – Completely Unknown is the poet Robert Allen Zimmerman would have become if he had devoted his prodigious poetic talent to the composition of poems, rather than to the composition of songs.
2025 finds us in the turvy cycle of our topsy-turvy existence. The muddier politics become, the more our thinking about art ought to be as clear as a mountain brook. The slackness of public ethics mustn’t spill over and dilute the precision of language.
When he created Bob Dylan, he married his poetic talent to an equally impressive musical sensibility, a significant part of which is performance. Even as pop media writers keep calling him an enigma, he couldn’t have been more candid when he declared himself to be a “song and dance man.”
The reason a song is a song and a poem a poem, is because, in the composition, there are innumerable problems to be resolved, and the nature of the thing in question will dictate the answers.
To be regarded as good or great, songs must delight the ear and sound good, poems must please the imagination and say something worth being said. When the function and purpose of a text is the sound it makes in performance, words are chosen and arranged according to how well they contribute to the sound.
… poems have an extrasensory purpose
Songs and poems both must attend to the audible properties of rhythm, internal, and external rhyme, but poems have an extrasensory purpose, and must delight the imagination also, besides the ear. Poems must produce beautiful imagery in the mind of the reader/listener. Therefore, words are selected for their fitness to evoke and convey whatever sense and sensuality the poem is meant to evoke and convey.
A song, in performance or on record, may include the tinkling of bells; a poem must make the reader/listener imagine the tinkling of bells – they must “hear” them in the quiet conservatory of the mind. Either the ear, or the imagination must be served first; that is what distinguishes songs from poems, music from poetry. They are so close, sometimes indistinguishable, but they are not the same thing, even as identical twins are not the same person.
It is no failing of fanaticism to regard the totality of Bob Dylan’s music in the same hushed tones we speak of William Shakespeare. But it is not irrelevant that he employed hundreds of people, including scores of superb musicians, to make what he made.
However the work of William Shakespeare is indebted to the history of English kings, Bob Dylan’s owes to the recording industry. Such is art, a thing that feeds and grows upon itself.