tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/charles-baudelaire-33412/articlesCharles Baudelaire – The Conversation2019-10-30T13:29:36Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1188742019-10-30T13:29:36Z2019-10-30T13:29:36ZWhy French poet Charles Baudelaire was the godfather of Goths<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299348/original/file-20191029-183120-jqdut2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The poet in a picture by Gustave Courbet.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Goths are typically regarded as being on the fringes of society – members of a subculture which finds beauty in the darker elements of human experience. And while their dress code is much imitated – and <a href="https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/people/the-25-best-photos-from-whitby-goth-festival-2019-1-10071521">celebrated</a> – over Halloween, they have a proud history that stretches far beyond a seasonal horror festival. </p>
<p>In fact, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) could easily qualify as the template goths (and other bohemians) aspire to. He often dressed in black, dyed his hair green, and rebelled against the conformist, bourgeois world of mid-19th century Paris in both his personal life and his art. </p>
<p>His first collections of poems, <a href="https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3618002.html">Les Fleurs du Mal</a> (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), was prosecuted for offending public morals, challenging its audiences with its startling treatments of sex, Satanism, vampirism and decay. No wonder his words would one day be <a href="https://www.baudelairesong.org/the-a-z-of-baudelaire/">set to music by The Cure</a>. </p>
<p>Aside from his writing, Baudlaire’s dissolute life was a checklist of boho credentials. He fell out with his family. He went bankrupt. He pursued reckless sexual experiments and contracted syphilis. He developed a drug habit. He associated with artists, musicians, writers and petty criminals rather than “respectable” people.</p>
<p>He outraged his family by having a mistress who was mixed race and probably illiterate. He refused conventional employment and made a precarious living as a writer, critic and occasional art dealer. </p>
<p>He wrote poetry which was prosecuted for obscenity and was adored by like-minded souls throughout Europe while being hated, even feared, by “straight” society. And then he died young, after years of serious illness and addiction, at the age of 46.</p>
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<span class="caption">Baudelaire, photographed by Étienne Carat in 1863.</span>
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<p>Baudelaire was also a dandy, clean-shaven in an age of whiskers and dressed immaculately despite squalid domestic circumstances. Never ostentatious, he wore sombre black in mourning for his times. </p>
<p>Considering nature to be tyrannical, he championed everything which fought or transcended it, while being, like many of his contemporaries, overtly misogynistic. “Woman is natural. That is to say, abominable,” <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=riWFCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=Woman+is+natural.+That+is+to+say,+abominable&source=bl&ots=Yho_FQ1Ih6&sig=ACfU3U1Bpwtnk8j-0yUzTVQTpiiVLi6Yzw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwig853g5cPlAhVwRxUIHcmXAIkQ6AEwEnoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=Woman%20is%20natural.%20That%20is%20to%20say%2C%20abominable&f=false">he wrote</a>. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, he recognised how both genders were trapped within their fleshly prisons and urged resistance to such incarceration through costume and cosmetics, recreational sex, drugs and alcohol.</p>
<p>Baudelaire sounds like many later writers, actors and rock stars, but it is unfair to suggest his cultural importance resides only in his delinquent mannerisms. What makes Baudelaire so significant, and so relevant today, is his recognition in Les Fleurs du Mal, his prose poetry, and essays, that the urbanised, industrial and increasingly godless modern world is radically different from any earlier epoch. </p>
<p>Artists responding to these new conditions of existence cannot cling to outworn traditions. They need instead to cast off convention and rethink their relationship to their culture and surroundings. </p>
<p>Baudelaire’s <a href="https://library.brown.edu/cds/baudelaire/translations1.html">translations of Edgar Allan Poe</a> brought the American writer to a new audience – and the morbidity of many Baudelaire poems suggests the two men were kindred spirits. In <a href="https://fleursdumal.org/poem/126">Une Charogne</a> (A Carcass, 1857) for example, he recounts finding a woman’s maggot-infested body, cataloguing her obscene decay in hideous detail before telling his lover that one day, she too will be rotten and worm-eaten. </p>
<p>Like his contemporary, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gustave-Flaubert">Gustave Flaubert</a>, Baudelaire felt stifled and alienated by the bombastic hypocrisy of <a href="https://www.history.org.uk/secondary/resource/475/napoleon-iii-and-the-french-second-empire">Napoleon III’s Second Empire</a>. He despaired at the gulf between public morality and private vice, and was sickened by the rise of bourgeois respectability, the protestant work ethic, and the sweeping modernisation of Paris itself. </p>
<p>Disdaining realism’s preoccupation with appearances, his writing examined the mental states his surroundings produced: boredom, an aggressive self-lacerating melancholy, and <em>ennui</em> – the listlessness and depression which left sufferers joyless and blasé. </p>
<p>He depicted himself as being like the king of a rainy country gripped by an unending despair, prematurely aged, impotent and sorrowful with no clear cause. “Life is a hospital,” <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/782454-this-life-is-a-hospital-in-which-each-patient-is">he wrote</a>, “in which all the patients are obsessed with changing their beds. One would prefer to suffer beside the fire, another thinks he’d recover sooner if placed by the window.” </p>
<h2>A series of unfortunate events</h2>
<p>More than 150 years after his death, Baudelaire remains a challenging figure – not least for his <a href="https://www.baudelairesong.org/should-feminists-read-baudelaire-3/">sexual attitudes</a>. Nevertheless, his influence is undeniable. <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2929192.pdf?seq=1/subjects#page_scan_tab_contents">T.S. Eliot hailed him</a> in <a href="https://www.bl.uk/works/the-waste-land">The Waste Land</a> (1922), borrowing his line: “<em>Hypocrite lecteur – mon semblable – mon frère!</em>” (Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother), for his dissection of the post-1918 world. </p>
<p>More recently, English author Angela Carter’s <a href="https://www.angelacarter.co.uk/black-venus/">Black Venus</a> (1985) gave a voice to Baudelaire’s mistress, Jeanne Duval, who rages at how “his eloquence denied her language”. And How Beautiful You Are, by Gothic rockers The Cure (1987) <a href="https://twostorymelody.com/literary-brilliance-cures-beautiful/">adapted his prose-poem</a> Les Yeux des Pauvres (The Eyes of the Poor). </p>
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<p>Baudelaire’s rich musical heritage is being currently documented by the <a href="https://www.baudelairesong.org">Baudelaire Song Project</a>. His notion of the “<em>flaneur</em>”, the aimless urban idler, influenced the German philosopher Walter Benjamin and the explorations of modern <a href="https://theconversation.com/psychogeography-a-way-to-delve-into-the-soul-of-a-city-78032">psychogeographers</a>. His presence even lurks in the young adult fiction of <a href="https://www.lemonysnicket.com">Lemony Snicket</a>, where the Baudelaire children suffer a series of unfortunate events.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, black remains one of the uniforms of teenage disaffection from London to Tokyo, shaping the subcultures of the past four decades. Baudelaire’s existential anxieties and refusal to capitulate to the forces of conformity make him a continued inspiration.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/118874/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Freeman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>His legacy connects a great swathe of modern popular culture.Nick Freeman, Reader in Late Victorian Literature, Loughborough UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/876152018-05-15T22:58:43Z2018-05-15T22:58:43ZThe 19th century book that spawned the opioid crisis<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218834/original/file-20180514-100690-1elyimi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' was the first modern drug memoir and set the tone for opium use for decades. Here: Papaver somniferum (Opium poppy), a group of deep red flowers, buds and seed pods. Opium is extracted from the latex of the unripe seed pods. Ripe seeds are innocuous and widely used in baking.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pv8fdgxe">(Rowan McOnegal/Wellcome Collection)</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1804, a 19-year-old Oxford University undergraduate named Thomas De Quincey swallowed a prescribed dose of opium to relieve excruciating rheumatic pain. He was never the same. </p>
<p>“Oh! Heavens!” he wrote of the experience in the first modern drug memoir, <em><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2040/2040-h/2040-h.htm">Confessions of an English Opium-Eater</a></em>, published in 1821. “What an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse of the world within me!” </p>
<p>That the drug took away his physical pain was “a trifle,” De Quincey asserted, compared to “the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me.” </p>
<p>Over the next eight years, De Quincey used opium to heighten his enjoyment of books, music, solitude and urban wandering. In effect, he invented recreational drug taking.</p>
<p>Yet all the while opium was tightening its grip on him, and in 1813 he succumbed to an addiction that tormented him until his death in 1859, more than half a century after he had first tampered with the drug. </p>
<p>“Who is the man who can take his leave of the realms of opium?” demanded the great 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire in his <em><a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Artificial_Paradises.html?id=CqNcAAAAMAAJ">Artificial Paradises</a></em> (1860). Not De Quincey. </p>
<p>And, as today’s opioid crisis makes clear, not millions of others who have followed him into addiction, and who have had their lives ravaged by the drug. De Quincey’s <em>Confessions</em> transformed perceptions of opium and mapped several crucial areas of drug experience that still provoke intense debate today. </p>
<p>I have conducted research into the life and writings of Thomas De Quincey for 30 years, and my work on him includes a biography, <a href="http://robertjhmorrison.com/437-2/"><em>The English Opium-Eater</em></a>, and a critical edition of his <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/confessions-of-an-english-opium-eater-and-other-writings-9780199600618?q=Robert%20Morrison&lang=en&cc=us"><em>Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings</em></a>. My understanding of his opium addiction has benefited greatly from my consultations with <a href="http://www.queensu.ca/psychology/people/faculty/mary-olmstead">Prof. Mary Olmstead</a> of the Centre for Neuroscience Studies at Queen’s University.</p>
<h2>The oldest drug</h2>
<p>Opium is probably the oldest drug known to humankind. It is derived from the unripe seedpod of the poppy plant, <em>Papaver somniferum</em>. The ancient Greek poet Homer almost certainly refers to it as “a drug to quiet all pain and strife” in his epic poem, <em>The Odyssey</em>, which was written in the eight or ninth century BC, and which De Quincey quotes in his <em>Confessions</em>. </p>
<p>For thousands of year, opium was the principal analgesic known to medicine. In the 16th century, the German-Swiss alchemist Paracelsus described it as “a secret remedy.” </p>
<p>At the end of the 18th century, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant warned of its dangers: Opium produces a “dreamy euphoria” that makes one “silent, reticent, and withdrawn,” he stated in his <em><a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Kant_The_Metaphysics_of_Morals.html?id=MJcrTG6tJsAC&redir_esc=y">Metaphysics of Morals</a></em> (1797), and it is “therefore permitted only” for medical reasons.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218841/original/file-20180514-100703-1yf8gog.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218841/original/file-20180514-100703-1yf8gog.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218841/original/file-20180514-100703-1yf8gog.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218841/original/file-20180514-100703-1yf8gog.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218841/original/file-20180514-100703-1yf8gog.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1147&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218841/original/file-20180514-100703-1yf8gog.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1147&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218841/original/file-20180514-100703-1yf8gog.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1147&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Opium tincture was used widely as a pain killer in the early 19th century.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pfzy2a4v">(Science Museum, London)</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>In early 19th-century Britain, opium was everywhere. People of every age and class used it for self-medication like we use aspirin today. It was legal. It was cheap. It was available in a wide range of cure-alls, including Godfrey’s Cordial, the Kendal Black Drop and Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup. </p>
<p>It was used to treat all manner of major and minor illness, from cancer and diabetes to travelling sickness, hay fever, headache and depression. Pharmacists sold it, as did grocers, bakers, tailors, market vendors and country peddlers. There were no efforts to regulate its sale until the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(02)75939-4">Pharmacy Act of 1868</a>.</p>
<h2>Over-prescribed</h2>
<p>De Quincey consumed opium as “laudanum,” which is prepared by dissolving opium in alcohol. Morphine, the principal active agent in opium, was isolated in 1803 and delivered with a hypodermic syringe by the 1850s. </p>
<p>At the beginning of the 20th century, opium was better known in the form of one of its chief derivatives: Heroin. Today, opioids are sold in powerful prescription medications, including tramadol, methadone and oxycodone. They are also, of course, widely available in illegal forms such as heroin, or in illicit forms of legal drugs — like fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. </p>
<p>Fuelled by decades of over-prescription, the United States gets 30 times more opioid medication than it needs, and opioid overdoses kill more than <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43305340">140 people daily</a>. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, in other countries, patients are forced to endure severe or chronic pain because <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42871641">there is a shortage of the drug</a>. Mexico gets only 36 per cent of the opioid medication it needs; China 16 per cent; India just four per cent. </p>
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<span class="caption">De Quincey’s descriptions of opium shaped modern perceptions: A 1962 movie was made based on his book.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Allied Artists Pictures)</span></span>
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<p>De Quincey’s descriptions of his opium experience have thoroughly shaped modern perceptions of the drug, and in a variety of ways. He glamorized opium in his <em>Confessions</em>, linking it to spectacular dream sceneries, visionary forms of creativity and intellectual, moral and emotional bliss. </p>
<p>In 1824, the authors of the <em><a href="https://archive.org/details/b24921841_0001">Family Oracle of Health</a></em> damned the <em>Confessions</em> for producing misery in those who had read it and begun to abuse opium. </p>
<p>They were right to worry. Many 19th- and 20th-century addicts have said explicitly that De Quincey led them to the drug. </p>
<p>Typically, “ever since I read De Quincey in my early teens I’d planned to try opium,” Ann Marlowe confessed in 1999 in her <em><a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-465-03150-4">How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z</a></em>.</p>
<p>De Quincey was also the first to explore the painful cycles of intoxication, withdrawal and relapse and his accounts are deeply consonant with modern descriptions. Once he was habituated to opium, he no longer experienced anything like the euphoria he enjoyed as a recreational user. </p>
<p>When he determined to kick his habit, what he called “nervous misery” marked the beginning of withdrawal. If he attempted to battle through it, he was hit hard by vomiting, nausea, irritability and depression. He often fought these miseries, too, but then his resolution faltered, and he went back to opium. His intake levels gradually climbed. He spiralled toward rock bottom. The grim cycle began again. </p>
<p>Like the vast majority of addicts from his day to ours, De Quincey could come off opium. He just could not stay off opium.</p>
<h2>Myth making</h2>
<p>In one fundamental respect, however, De Quincey’s account of opioid addiction does not tally with today’s medical knowledge. </p>
<p>By common consent, the pain of opioid withdrawal usually lasts about a week and is like having a very bad flu. De Quincey tells a different story. “Think of me as of one, even when four months had passed, still agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered,” he wrote. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218845/original/file-20180514-100716-1kh1xdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218845/original/file-20180514-100716-1kh1xdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218845/original/file-20180514-100716-1kh1xdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218845/original/file-20180514-100716-1kh1xdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218845/original/file-20180514-100716-1kh1xdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218845/original/file-20180514-100716-1kh1xdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218845/original/file-20180514-100716-1kh1xdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Pages from De Quincey’s ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wellcomecollection.org/works/f59epk5k">(Wellcome Collection)</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>Such depictions exaggerated the agonies of withdrawal and established the erroneous conviction that it is a hellishly long process. In <em><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Romancing-Opiates-Pharmacological-Addiction-Bureaucracy/dp/1594032254">Romancing Opiates</a></em> (2006), Theodore Dalrymple condemned the uncritical acceptance and enduring impact of De Quincey’s <em>Confessions</em>. “When it comes to drug addiction,” Dalrymple stated, “literature has trumped — and over-trumped — pharmacology, history, and common-sense.”</p>
<p>De Quincey had a deeply paradoxical relationship with opium, and more than 30 years after his addiction had taken hold, he was the first to detail the sickening confusion that so many addicts have found at the crux of their drug experience. </p>
<p>Opium, he asserted, was a con that could convince long-term addicts that they could lay it aside easily and within a week. </p>
<p>Opium was a trade-off that defeated steady exertion, but that gave irregular bursts of energy. Opium was irresistible, like a celestial lover. And opium was a blight that withered life. The collision of these competing impulses made it difficult for De Quincey to see his addiction clearly, and impossible for him to surmount it. </p>
<p>“Since leaving off opium,” he once noted wryly, “I take a great deal too much of it for my health.”</p>
<p>De Quincey initiated the story of modern addiction. There were countless users and abusers before him stretching back to the ancient world, but he was the first to publish a compelling narrative that explored the seductive pleasures and eviscerating pains of the drug. </p>
<p>He has been castigated for celebrating opium and for spreading misinformation about it. But in 1844 he was categorical about his drug abuse, and his harrowing words anticipate the testimonies of so many of the addicts caught up in today’s opioid crisis. “Not fear or terror,” De Quincey wrote, “but inexpressible misery, is the last portion of the opium-eater.”</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The BBC’s,‘The Secret Life of Books,’ devoted to De Quincey’s ‘Confessions,’ hosted by John Cooper Clarke. (The author Robert Morrison was involved in its production and is interviewed in the film.)</span></figcaption>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Morrison has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Parts of this essay draw on material first published in his biography of Thomas De Quincey.</span></em></p>‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ is considered the first modern drug memoir. Many believe it is responsible for our romantic ideas of opium-based drug use today.Robert Morrison, Professor of English Language and Literature, Queen's University, OntarioLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/689282016-11-21T10:44:09Z2016-11-21T10:44:09ZFive extraordinary poems that inspired Bob Dylan<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146593/original/image-20161118-19334-1q11cmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dylan: not leaning on his guitar.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/badosa/9488666868/in/photolist-fstU5C-oaGNHR-DL9Am-6Qai86-fstT8N-JFJQA-fseydg-fstSNo-9BQ2o8-4V4khQ-9UQLyR-9UQLiV-9UQLMX-9UQLtz-3wjGj6-aEsQZb-59Efn1-fsu1tq-yr5HEa-7YEeyU-c1F3Wh-gafvUx-5ijYuf-5ifFrv-5izouH-5iDEzo-5iDEUb-5ijYvs-5ijYpW-5iDESf-5ijYoh-5izosc-5ijYs7-5iDEKu-JFJQy-5iDEQh-55W45D-3dm9ZV-dNFktJ-dNzJtp-ix9YEb-3xmfsP-aCuwTi-a218Ht-aCxcNw-aCxcJA-aCuwFc-KMJj4-KMxwq-dWYCP">Xavier Badosa via Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Robert Lowell said that Bob Dylan wasn’t a poet because he “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GvLq2Xd8zjkC&pg=PA170&lpg=PA170&dq=robert+lowell+bob+dylan+hamilton+leans+crutch+guitar&source=bl&ots=YWnJMuqDC0&sig=eiAy0475WGkIeKATo2Rg3ohL4hY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjRlvbpjK3QAhUqIsAKHXmHBccQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=robert%20lowell%20bob%20dylan%20hamilton%20leans%20crutch%20guitar&f=false">leaned on the crutch of his guitar</a>”. The Nobel committee clearly disagree – they awarded him the <a href="http://www.nme.com/news/music/1858001-1858001">Nobel Prize in Literature</a>. Indeed, Dylan has leaned on poetry more than any other musician, before or since. Here are five poets who provided him with inspiration.</p>
<h2>Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)</h2>
<p>Baudelaire’s use of hashish, dissatisfaction with the uptight middle-classes, and celebration of prostitutes, visionaries and outsiders produced a poetry that would have resonated with the Dylan of Mr Tambourine Man.</p>
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<p>Baudelaire’s <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/anywhere-out-of-the-world/">Anywhere Out of this World</a> shares and anticipates Dylan’s pot-fuelled, visionary lyrics of the mid-1960s. Baudelaire writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Let us go farther still to the extreme end of the Baltic; or farther still from life, if that is possible…<br>
At last my soul explodes, and wisely cries out to me: “No matter where! No matter where! As long as it’s out of the world!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And it seems Dylan wasn’t leaning very heavily on the crutch of his guitar when in <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/mr-tambourine-man/">Mr Tambourine Man</a> he wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free<br>
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands<br>
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves<br>
Let me forget about today until tomorrow…</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Walt Whitman (1819-1892)</h2>
<p>Walt Whitman’s inclusive, democratic vision of America would have been of enormous appeal to the young Dylan. The 1856 edition of his <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27494.Leaves_of_Grass">Leaves of Grass</a> presents a poet – open-shirted, unshaven, sexually assured – that would not have been out of place on any of Dylan’s 1960s album covers. Whitman’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45472">I Sing the Body Electric</a> – with its unknowing nod towards Dylan’s move from folk troubadour to electric bohemian – opens:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I sing the body electric,<br>
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,<br>
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,<br>
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>His extended, visionary lines anticipated and inspired Dylan’s long lyrics from <a href="http://bobdylan.com/albums/hard-rain/">Hard Rain</a> through <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/desolation-row/">Desolation Row</a> and provided a model that the young singer was keen to follow.</p>
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<h2>Andre Breton (1896-1966)</h2>
<p>Andre Breton was the figurehead of the <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/surrealism">Surrealists</a>; a group of writers who gathered in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. The Surrealists’ surprising, erotic images of women find resonances in Dylan’s romantic lyrics. Breton’s <a href="http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/expansive-poetics-97-andre-breton-2.html">Free Union</a> is a list poem in which a love of language and of woman overwhelms the reader with poetry and erotic intent. It begins:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My wife with the hair of a wood fire<br>
With the thoughts of heat lightning<br>
With the waist of an hourglass<br>
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dylan’s images of love and of women are rarely commented upon. If they are, he is often mocked for the surrealism of his lyrics. <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/love-minus-zero-no-limit/">Love Minus Zero / No Limit</a> contains the verse:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The cloak and dagger dangles<br>
Madams light the candles<br>
In ceremonies of the horsemen<br>
Even the pawn must hold a grudge<br>
Statues made of matchsticks<br>
Crumble into one another<br>
My love winks, she does not bother<br>
She knows too much to argue or to judge </p>
</blockquote>
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<p>If Dylan is at fault here, then so is an entire literary and artistic movement. In his greatest moments, Dylan nailed surrealism and love as well as any of its most important poets.</p>
<h2>Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)</h2>
<p>One can only imagine how the teenage, Jewish Dylan must have marvelled at the geeky, bespectacled beat poet <a href="http://allenginsberg.org">Ginsberg</a>, and the impact of his poem <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49303">Howl</a>. Dylan’s <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/hard-rains-gonna-fall/">A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall</a> recognises Ginsberg’s “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”,
and recycles them into “I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken / I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children.”</p>
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<h2>Langston Hughes (1902-1967)</h2>
<p>One of the key poets of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/langston-hughes">Hughes</a> was responsible for the integration of jazz and black art forms into poetry. In <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/46548">Harlem</a> he uses short, rhyming lines that anticipate the proto-rap of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. Here is the complete poem:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What happens to a dream deferred? </p>
<p>Does it dry up<br>
like a raisin in the sun?<br>
Or fester like a sore—<br>
And then run?<br>
Does it stink like rotten meat?<br>
Or crust and sugar over—<br>
like a syrupy sweet? </p>
<p>Maybe it just sags<br>
like a heavy load. </p>
<p>Or does it explode? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bob Dylan – <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/subterranean-homesick-blues/">“on the pavement / thinking about the government”</a> – transformed popular culture in the 1960s. To many, his lyrics seemed to come out of nowhere. If all you had been doing was listening to Sinatra, they did. </p>
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<p>For the bohemians who had been hanging out in coffee-houses and paying attention to the poets, however, all he was doing was doing what poets have always been doing: making it new, and telling it like it is.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68928/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tim Atkins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>He was criticised for leaning on the crutch of his guitar, but if Dylan leaned on anything, it was his love of poetry.Tim Atkins, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of East LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.