Eliot to Ginsberg to Dylan.
Bob Dylan’s 1965 masterpiece “Desolation Row,” which closes the album Highway 61 Revisited, has been compared to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1955) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl. Links to the texts of the poems are in blue, and “Desolation Row” is in the Dylan e-book and on my Dylan Spotify playlist. “The Waste Land” and “Howl” are long, complicated poems, but don’t worry about that. Just let the images flow through your mind and enjoy the ride. The same can be said of the Dylan song. These three poems illustrate how literature works, how all writers work within a literary continuum that sometimes stretches back not only decades but centuries. Listen to Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins read “The Waste Land” and Allen Ginsberg read “Howl”: https://youtu.be/sYROFY_Kh8M
If you were to read “The Waste Land” in a book, you would find several pages of notes at the end of it. The notes alert readers to all the intertextuality going on in the poem. From the Bible to Baudelaire and everything in between, Eliot takes what fits and puts it in its proper place in the phantasmagoria of his “Waste Land.” The poem we have today was even longer in its original form. Eliot needed help, and he called upon Ezra Pound, whom he called “il miglior fabbro,” which in this case means “the better craftsman,” to edit it. Eliot’s wife, Vivienne, also helped the poet write his masterpiece. “Howl” was introduced to the world when Allen Ginsberg read it aloud at a place called the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. The poem created quite a stir (it was put on trial for being obscene), and poetry has never been quite the same since. And, of course, Dylan songs like “Desolation Row” changed songwriting forever, bringing it to a level never reached before. Like T.S. Eliot, Ginsberg annotated “Howl.” These annotations were published in an edition of “Howl” edited by Barry Miles.
Examine all of this stuff in an essay with at least 500 words of your own writing about the connections you see and how the later poems affect your understanding of the earlier ones.