Features Of Oral Poetry In Bob Dylan’s Works

Bob Dylan is a musician representing the popular culture of the 1960 s in the United States.His works have high literary value and are still studied in different fields in the United States around the world today and Dylan is hailed as the father of folk rock and a contemporary Homer.The definition of oral poetry from The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is that oral poetry is traditional poetry that is composed and transmitted mainly but not exclusively by illiterate people and is passed down orally as long as the tradition lives.There are three general divisions of oral poetry by genre—ritual,lyric and narrative,and the two main types of narrative oral poetry are epic and ballad.Ballads are called folk songs in America,therefore,Dylan’s works are inextricably related to oral poetry.Dylan’s works are not strictly oral traditional poetry: firstly,he is an educated intellectual;secondly,his works are not exclusively passed down orally,because the new recording technology allows him to spread his works by records in addition to live concerts.However,there are features of oral poetry in his works.This thesis treats Dylan’s works as oral poetry and analyses the traditional features of oral poetry in his works as well as his innovative contributions to this literary tradition.This thesis is composed of five parts.The introduction that contains a brief summary of Dylan’s status and achievements,a literature review,and the method of research used in the thesis.The main body contains three chapters that study Dylan’s works’ political,structural and performative features.In the first chapter the thesis analyzes the political feature of oral poetry in Dylan’s works.Oral poetry is created by uneducated or illiterate folks who express their opinions about the lives of the lower class and therefore have political orientations of defending the interests of the lower class.Dylan’s works also have a same political stand,because his works develop from folk songs of the white farmers and workers and black folk songs and a large part of his early songs are rally songs about civil rights for the black and about the hard life of people living at the low stratum of the society.In the second chapter the structural or formal features are examined.Oral poetry is a flexible form of art,and the original materials can be rewritten and transformed into something new by later artists.In Dylan’s case,he inherited the art of traditional folk songs and combined it with forms of art that are newly sprout or recently became popular in his time.In the third chapter,the thesis analyzes the performative features of Dylan’s works.Oral traditional poetry lacks a fixed text and only exists in the form of performance.In Dylan’s case,his works also can be better understood in his performance.Records or albums have made sound memorization of his songs possible,but in records there are still no written texts.Dylan’s works’ complete form is in his performance and one cannot grasp the multiple meaning of his works by simply analyzing the lyrics.Therefore,this thesis argues that there are political,structural and performative features of oral traditional poetry embodied in Dylan’s works while he adds innovative contributions to the tradition.The thesis also finds that learning from the tradition and create works that reflect the spirit of the time is what makes Dylan’s works significant and valuable.