Dylan upends the myth of early genius in other ways. To write the new songs that were to really launch his career the ones on Freewheelin that made his reputation took enormous self discipline. He first went from admiring songs like “Joe Hill” the 1936 song by Earl Robinson to wanting to write similar ballads that (as he says in the Chronicles) that were “bigger than life.” He had to undergo some rigorous training breaking himself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles. He set himself the task of reading longer and longer poems. “I had to train my mind to do this. He read all of Lord Byron’s Don Juan “and concentrated fully from start to finish.” He recognized himself as “pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was going to have to fill up and have to pull harder. When he arrived in New York he was preparing to shed another skin, what he referred to as Kerouac’s “hungry for kicks” hipster version of himself , Moriaty Kerouac’s alter ego in On the Road seemed to him purposeless--seemed like a character who inspired idiocy. He needed to move a category of singer that had not been invented yet--you were either a folksinger or a pop artist. Singer song writer or protest singer had not been invented yet as he also notes in Chronicles. But while he started to form ideas of the kinds of songs he wanted to write he still needed something to say and for that he spent endless hours in the New York Public Library--reading about American history from 1855 to 1865 “ to see what daily life was like”. Looking for the language and rhetoric. He sees a story without any real redeeming virtues. “The suffering is endless, and the punishment is going to be forever..the age that I was living in didnt resemble that age but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit but a lot.” We can assume during this time he was also reading Ginsburg which had come out in 1955 and offered a personae that was part Old Testament prophet, part modern hipster who had perfected the long lines and arresting imagery. Ginsburg’s personae in Howl takes to a bardic stage that mixes traditional poetic language with that of the streets in a way Whitman would have approved
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”
“Everyone who knew him” as Suze Rotolo, the girlfriend depicted on the iconic album cover of Freewheelin, recalls whether they were musicians or not, was sucked in by his fever to learn.” Through his relationship with Suze he was absorbing understanding the deep passions of the American left for “civil rights, banning the bomb and any kind of injustice.” Suze recognizes that she had been exposed to “a lot more than a kid from Hibbing Minnesota was: especially with my upbringing”
But then there was the work of that Dylan had to do inside his head and heart to pull from the fragments of experience; the merging worlds of beat poetry, folk music, political activism who he was and what he wanted to say. How should he view the nuclear bomb as part of the worlds’ general irrationaility for which there is no real answer or explanation, or as part of a horrific evil game played by the Masters of War who “hide behind desks” and expect never to be accountable. What really stirred Dylan’s imagination though was whether he could like a prophet help turn the world back from embracing the darkness of nuclear apolclpse. No song in the folk singer catalogue had ever attempted to paint on quite so an ambitious canvas, one that describes a nightmarish landscape of a child who has seen a vision of suffering and finds his only meaning in helping the millions of people poised between suffering and complete loss
And what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son ?
And what'll you do now my darling young one ?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin'
I'll walk to the deepths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are a many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
….
But I'll know my songs well before I start singin'
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
32