Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Modernist Poem The Waste Land

As a recent piece in The Inde­pen­dent notes, “stu­dents of lit­er­ate song­writ­ing” are unsur­prised to find ref­er­ences to T.S. Eliot scat­tered through­out the pop canon: Gen­e­sis, Man­ic Street Preach­ers, Arcade Fire… and of course, Bob Dylan. Dylan arguably makes ref­er­ence to Eliot’s mas­ter­work The Waste Land with the line “in the waste­land of your mind” from “When The Night Comes Falling from the Sky.”

And in the penul­ti­mate verse of “Des­o­la­tion Row,” he gives us an image of “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot / Fight­ing in the captain’s tow­er.” As with every oth­er line in the song, this could mean just about any­thing. But giv­en Dylan’s admi­ra­tion for The Waste Land, it could eas­i­ly refer to the edi­to­r­i­al tug-of-war between the two poets, as it was Pound who shaped Eliot’s poem into the work we have today. And then there’s the tow­er image so promi­nent in Eliot’s great poem, an occult motif Dylan returned to.

Just above, hear Dylan riff on the first four lines of The Waste Land for his XM Radio show Theme Time Radio Hour, which aired from May 2006 to April 2009. On the show, Dylan played records, respond­ed to (fake) lis­ten­er emails, read poet­ry, told jokes, and did musi­cal bits, all in keep­ing with themes like “Mon­ey” and “Weath­er.” (You can catch two episodes a day on dylanradio.com).

He reads Eliot in a faux-beat cadence—sounding like Tom Waits—with a juke joint piano bang­ing away behind him. Dylan opens his read­ing with some brief com­men­tary, telling us that Eliot’s poem “com­mem­o­rat­ed the death of Abra­ham Lin­coln.” This throw­away line may just give us a fas­ci­nat­ing glimpse into Dylan’s lit­er­ary sen­si­bil­i­ties. Know­ing that Eliot’s lilacs refer to Lin­coln seems almost cer­tain­ly to indi­cate that Dylan knows they first refer to Walt Whit­man, whose “When Lilacs Last in the Door­yard Bloom’d” direct­ly com­mem­o­rates Lin­coln.

Of course, he isn’t going to tell us that, if he knows it, just like he won’t give any­thing away in “Des­o­la­tion Row,” a song so filled with ref­er­ences to famous fig­ures and works of art that it’s hard to tell how much is “orig­i­nal” Dylan and how much a patch­work of para­phrase. The dis­tinc­tion hard­ly mat­ters, Dylan seems to sug­gest in his eli­sion of Whit­man. Eliot’s poem is, line by line, so much a col­lage of allu­sion and cita­tion that there seems to be no Eliot at all, just a mani­a­cal edi­tor (or two). The first line of the poem—“April is the cru­elest month”—traces in part to French Sym­bol­ist Jules Laforgue, one of Eliot’s favorites, who begins his “October’s Lit­tle Mis­eries” with “Every Octo­ber I start to get upset.” And Eliot’s orig­i­nal title, “He Do the Police in Dif­fer­ent Voic­es” comes ver­ba­tim from Dick­ens’ Our Mutu­al Friend. As any­one who’s read Eliot in an aca­d­e­m­ic set­ting knows, the list goes on, and on.

One of the effects of Eliot’s mas­tery of oth­er people’s work (hear him read his poem above), which he could dis­as­sem­ble and make mon­strous­ly his own, is that his crit­ics and fans will nev­er tire of pulling apart his dense­ly com­pressed vers­es and pok­ing around inside them. Like­wise Dylan. The lat­ter nev­er passed him­self off as a poet explic­it­ly (although he’s often read that way), but as a song­writer he’s spawned a cot­tage cul­ture indus­try as pro­duc­tive as Eliot’s. Even his erst­while radio show, in which he offered his own com­men­tary and crit­i­cism, has its com­men­tary and crit­i­cism from fans. I may nev­er be con­vinced that songs—pop, folk, hip-hop, or otherwise—work the same way as poems, but if any­one fig­ured out how to leap nim­bly over what­ev­er gap lies between them, Dylan cer­tain­ly did. Maybe one of the con­nec­tions he made is this: what seems to set both Dylan and Eliot apart from their peers is their com­pete dis­re­gard for notions of authen­tic­i­ty in favor of the play of “dif­fer­ent voices”—impersonation, quo­ta­tion, and homage to the artists they admire.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

T.S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Lis­ten to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Mas­ter­piece, the Four Quar­tets

Bob Dylan Final­ly Makes a Video for His 1965 Hit, “Like a Rolling Stone”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness