Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan: Poetry and the Popular Song

Type of resource
Authors/collaborators
Title
Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan: Poetry and the Popular Song
Abstract
A comparison (circa 1969) of the poetic song writing visions of Montrealer Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) and American Bob Dylan. According to the author, "Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen represent two highly contrasting directions from which the attempt to restore significance and integrity of vision to the popular song can be made. Bob Dylan is the child runaway who became a professional songwriter by deliberate hard work, and whose emergence as a poet of some talent seems to have been accidental, almost as if he had unconsciously realized that good songs have to contain reasonably good lyric poetry. Leonard Cohen is a university-educated formalistic poet who has moved in an opposite direction with his recent discovery that a good lyric poem could equally be a good song. Dylan brings to poetry a spontaneity of rhythm and a resourcefulness in imagery that had long been qualities of American folk music, as in that of Huddie Ledbetter or of Dylan's own idol, Woodie Guthrie. Cohen takes to the poem as popular song a scholarly precision of language and an obsession for extemal form."
Book Title
Leonard Cohen: The Artist and His Critics
Place
Toronto, ON
Publisher
McGraw-Hill Ryerson
Date
1976
Pages
111-124
Language
en
Notes

Originally published in: Alphabet. No. 17 (December 1969): 12-19. http://www.edlis.org/twice/threads/leonard_cohen.html

Citation
Davey, Frank. “Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan: Poetry and the Popular Song.” In Leonard Cohen: The Artist and His Critics, edited by Michael Gnarowski, 111–124. Toronto, ON: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976.
Find in a library
Permalink