SOURCE: "Dylan: Song Returns to Poetry," in Texas Quarterly, Vol. XIX, No. 4, Winter, 1976, pp. 131-36.

In the following essay, Lindstrom calls for a reevaluation of conventional thinking about the differences between the language of poetry and the language of popular songs, crediting Bob Dylan with initiating a trend in popular music toward the composition of more complex lyrics.

There is certainly much to remind us that poetry was once something for people to sing to one another. We use words that hark back to the old kinship between poetry and song: canto, cantico, lyric, sonnet (little song). Yet we must point out to literature students that the ballads frequently singled out as sung poetry, were by no means the only poetic form to be communicated in this manner. Indeed, it seems difficult to impress this fact on our own minds, so accustomed are we to the idea that...