Chris Doss wrote:
>
> --- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> >
> > P.S. "Song to Woody" is probably the best poem
> > written by a teenager
> > since the parts of Essay on Criticism written by a
> > teenage Pope.
> > ___________________________________
>
> Hey, you're tangling with Rimbaud here!
O.K. I'll add the qualification "in English."
Christopher Ricks, in _Dylan's Visions of Sin_, writes a very fine commentary on "Song to Woody." Here is the opening of that account:
*****It would have been only too human for Bob Dylan at nineteen to envy Woody Guthrie. His fame, for a start, and (not the same) the sheer respect in which Guthrie was held, his staunch stamina, his being an icon who wouldn't have any truck with such a self-conscious word and who had not let himself be become an idol. Enviable. Inevitably open, therefore, on a bad day, to competitive petulance:
For 'tis all one to courage high,
The emulous or enemy. [Marvell]
And yet not so. Truly high courage knows the difference between emulation and its enemy, envy. Dylan was sufficiently secure of his genius, even at the very start, to be able to rise above envy, rising to the occasion that was so much more than an occasion only.
_Song to Woody_ is one of only two songs written by Dylan himself on this first album. (If the song had been called _Song for Woody_, it would not be the same, would be in danger of mildly conceited cadging as against a tribute at a respectful distance.)****** (p. 51)
Carrol
P.S. On the power of words to deceive the user. I've noted this before but never so acutely as in this thread -- the tonal wrongness of "protest" in the phrase "protest songs." These are political anthems we are talking about, and I think some of the (fairly kneejerk) negative references to the works in question would not go over so well if "political anthems" or "political poetry" replaced "protest songs." But if one does want to stick to "protest songs," then in your private thought include under that label Wordsworth's sonnets to Milton, Lycidas, Epistle to Arbuthnot, Song to the Men of England, A Mask of Anarchy, France an Ode, To Penshurst, Blakes' "London," "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont," "I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs," "Triumph of Life," E.B. Browning's "A Curse for a Nation" . . . . .
Carrol