Bob Dylan is – famously – rock’s poet laureate, a man for whom words are an instrument. The songwriter has always been open in his influences, writing passionately in his memoir Chronicles about the impact that the Beat writers, or French poet Rimbaud, had on his youthful imagination.
One writer who recurs in various stages of Bob Dylan’s work is TS Eliot. The St Louis-born Modernist was an arch experimenter, someone who broadened the lexicon of English language verse; his latter work equally held a journey for spiritual truth.
As such, TS Eliot appears in various guises through Bob Dylan’s songwriting. The epic song ‘Desolation Row’ for example, explicitly namechecks the poet – “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower.”
Bob Dylan’s embrace of Christianity at the tail end of the 70s sparked another flurry of work, and some have observed parallels with TS Eliot’s own religious beliefs here. ‘I Believe In You’ for example – from his gospel album ‘Slow Train Coming’ – mirrors some of the message from the poet’s work Journey Of The Magi in its eviction of spiritual responsibility, and the toil of faith.
It’s a message Bob Dylan would make explicit on his lesser-heralded song ‘Maybe Someday’. Often overlooked, it appears on the songwriter’s 1986 work ‘Knocked Out Loaded’ and directly paraphrases a line from the poet’s work – Eliot’s “And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly” in Journey Of The Magi becomes in Dylan “Through hostile cities and unfriendly towns”.
Revisit the song below.
Finally, we should mention another potent Bob Dylan and TS Eliot connection. In the songwriter’s Theme Time Radio Hour he would frequently cite works that inspired him – and once read out the opening stanza from Eliot’s modernist work The Waste Land.
In Dylan’s opinion the opening atmosphere recalls the assignation of Abraham Lincoln – a stretch, but the President was indeed murdered on April 15th, 1865.
With his Beat inclinations and husky, Tom Waits style voice, it makes for a potent rendering of the poem.
Related: Five Unjustly Slept On Bob Dylan Albums
