Frank Scott wrote:
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> there is a difference between personal favorites, and what translates into market clout and vast social impact...can you seriously think these good folks are in the same category as dylan or the stones, or have anywhere , even remotely, their social impact or influence?
There is this: What would Dylan have been had it not been for the social/political movements of the '60s. I suspect he would still have been a good poet & musician -- but probably with a niche audience and with a much different body of work. ?????
No one has any magic formula for resolving the link of "artist" & "society," but it does not seem possible to extract any artist from his/her world. For example, the greatest of them all, the Iliad poet. Extracted from his world he is a bad 19th-c romantic novelist! The poem he produced could only have been composed in a world in which "glory" (the word is all wrong) had the same human significance as the vision of god had in the 13th century.
Carrol