Is Edwin Humphreys( Coll:, 24-) off his rocker?
The Wykehamist
Sappho, Spenser... Springsteen?
Is Edwin Humphreys( Coll:, 24-) off his rocker?
The Boss. The Jersey Devil. The Gut Bomb King.‘ Surely they put the wrong name in the title!’ I hear you exclaim. Bear with me. Poetry is when words become music, and Bruce Springsteen is poet laureate of the American Dream, a counter-modernist behemoth dancing in the dark.
‘ I sing of arms and a man.’ So goes the first line of the Aeneid. And that wasn’ t because Virgil was ready to whip out an aulos and drop the most iconic track in Roman history. Latin had the same word‘ carmen’ for poem and song. Poetry had been born out of an oral tradition, and so, it quickly drew itself to the rhythm and cadence that is the bedrock of recital and song. Though the Aeneid would have existed in scrolls, it continues the image of invoking the voice of the Muse— a sense of vocalisation that would continue to live in epic poetry right up to Milton’ s day.
The renaissance in vocal music that has culturally defined the twentieth century feels as if we are going back to poetry’ s most ancient roots. As folk tunes, nursery rhymes, and idiomatic turns of phrase become rarer, it feels as if their cultural place has made a transition to John Mellencamp and Don McLean. Whilst, as with any era, banal strings of epithet-status overused rhymes abound, some songwriters have created works of literature that are the anthems of our age, and they may well stand the test of time.
Can we really call The Boss a poet, though? In contrast to Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan, half-speaking the words he sings and rejecting one fixed melody line as Homer or Sappho might once have done, we first come to Springsteen for the music— the belting tunes and instrumental soli we know and love.
But I would argue that, even if we don’ t play Born to Run in the car because there wasn’ t any Milton to hand, if we examine the broader architecture of each of his albums or his entire oeuvre, we discover that the lyrics are what interconnects the songs’ cores. They speak as loud as the music on full blast, transporting us to the world that Springsteen knows; the broken marriages, the New Jersey topology and the culture of‘ the boss man giving you hell till you’ re out on the Midnight run’(‘ Night’). To only listen to the tunes is to forcibly dissociate the music from its one, congruous artistic vision. In fact, it is a humorously juvenile error. Politicians such as Ronald Reagan have enthusiastically jumped headfirst onto the feel-good, proud-to-be-an-American bandwagon of‘ Born in the USA’ in their political campaigns, only to be later told that it is about a disillusioned Vietnam War veteran living in an alienating world.‘ But it’ s in the major key,’ one might retort. Precisely— the lyrics are the necessary counterbalance that injects the dichotomy of the American dream into the music. The central emotional quality exists in the juxtaposition be-
‘ Born down in a dead man’ s town, the first kick I took was when I hit the ground’
16