Ambiguity and Abstraction in Bob Dylan's Lyrics
Too most people contemporary poetry is a turn-off. The cause for this really is that the majority of those poems are boring. They are so since they fail to enable people today to identify with them. The bulk of contemporary poetry is no longer about reader identification but about facts transfer, info that could just as easily be conveyed in a prose form. These poems are written merely to convey the poet's thoughts and feelings about a precise occasion, circumstance or spot he or she has knowledgeable or is inside the act of experiencing. The poet just isn't necessarily concerned with whether or not the reader is moved or not by the poem, so long as he or she understands clearly the info the poet is trying to convey. This may perhaps consist of some "important" insight gained from an knowledge, or it may very well be (as is normally the case) a jaded statement or commentary about some mundane aspect of contemporary life.
The common song at its ideal, having said that, does more than this. It excites each the imagination and emotions; it enables you to unlock your own personal extremely individual box of pictures, memories, connections and associations. This is most readily evidenced in the songs of Bob Dylan . Even one of the most perfunctory of his songs is able to do this to a greater extent than most "serious" poetry. This really is due to the fact his songs (and to a lesser extent songs in general) frequently utilise imprecise and abstract statements rather than distinct and specific ones. Contemporary poetry, alternatively, does the precise opposite of this: it utilises certain and specific statements as opposed to imprecise and abstract ones.
Dylan is not afraid to generalise, for he knows that it truly is only through generalisation that the reader can recognise the particular. Keats understood this when he mentioned that a poem 'should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity' and that 'it ought to strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and seem nearly as a remembrance' (letter to John Taylor , 27 February 1818).
David Bleich, in Readings and Feelings champions the inventive powers of your reader. He believes writing about literature need to not involve suppressing readers' individual concerns, anxieties, passions and enthusiasms because 'each person's most urgent motivations are to know himself'. And as a response to a literary function generally assists us find out some thing about ourselves, introspection and spontaneity are to be encouraged. Each act of response, he says, reflects the shifting motivations and perceptions of your reader at the moment of reading, and even essentially the most idiosyncratic and autobiographical response towards the text really should be heard sympathetically. In this way the reader is able to construct, or generate, a private exegesis by utilising the linguistic permutations inherent in the text to construct units of meaning constituted from a predominantly autobiographical frame of reference. The ambiguities present in Dylan's oeuvre enable the listener to perform specifically this.
