Richard Thomas - Why Dylan Matters

In his 2007 movie, I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes used Dylan’s 1966 song “I Want You” for a scene in which Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing the roles of Robbie and Claire, immediately recognizable versions of Bob and Sara Lownds, first fall in love. The song encapsulates first love, joyous, and just right for that moment, with its highly poetic verses and its simple, direct refrain: “I want you, I want you / I want you so bad / Honey, I want you.” Catullus too captured in his poetry the first flush of love, for instance in one of his “kiss” poems: “Suns can set and then come back again, / When our short day sets once and for all, / our night must be forever to be slept. / Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, / then another thousand and second hundred, / then still another thousand, then a hundred.”

But the lyrics of Catullus and of Dylan mostly share a focus on love that is lost, that doesn’t work out—that’s where the poetry is. So, for instance, Catullus Poem 11, one of his last poems to Lesbia, the name he gave to the Muse (recalling Sappho, who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos), who inspired his love song. He begins with an address to two acquaintances, whose task it will be to take a message to Lesbia: “You who are ready to try out / whatever the will of the gods will bring / Take a brief message to my old girlfriend / words that she won’t like. / Let her live and be well with her three hundred lovers, / Not really truly loving them / but screwing them all again and again.” The poem ends by shifting the brutal tone and bringing out the hurt and the love that is still there: “Let her not look back for my love as before / which through her fault has fallen like a flower on the edge of a meadow / nicked by the blade of a passing plough.”

By 1975, whatever the realities of his relationship with his wife, Sara, Dylan was, like Catullus as time went by, approaching the end of a relationship in trouble, and he constructed a lyric voice that made art from that situation. The song we already saw, “If You See Her, Say Hello,” is similarly about a relationship that is over:

If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier

She left here last early spring, is livin’ there, I hear

Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow

She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell her it isn’t so

The song, separated from the autobiographical, is like Catullus’s poem, and is there for anyone who has shared that loss and hurt. Like Catullus, Dylan too imagines the rival who has supplanted him: “If you’re making love to her …” Back in Ann Arbor, I was reading the Latin poetry of one, and listening to the songs of the other. And that is how Catullus and Dylan, both lyric poets, sharing common human situations across twenty centuries, have become inextricably linked in my mind, and why they belong together.

Catullus would have been much more familiar in America in the early 1960s, as is clear from an early scene from Cleopatra. It was the highest-grossing film of 1963, won four Academy Awards, and still lost money, so costly was its production. It is highly likely that Dylan, like millions in America and around the world, saw it that year, as I did back in New Zealand. Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, kittenish and scantily clad on her couch in Alexandria, receives a visit from Rex Harrison’s Julius Caesar. Richard Burton’s Mark Antony is waiting in the wings, and will take over after the assassination of Caesar on those Ides of March. Her spies have reported on Caesar’s movements:

CLEOPATRA: This morning early, you paid a formal visit to the tomb of Alexander. You remained alone beside his sarcophagus for some time. … And then you cried. Why did you cry, Caesar?

CAESAR, CHANGING THE SUBJECT: That man recites beautifully. Is he blind?

AN ATTENDANT: Don’t you hurt him.

CAESAR: I won’t. Not anyone who speaks Catullus so well.

CLEOPATRA: Catullus doesn’t approve of you. Why haven’t you had him killed?

CAESAR: Because I approve of him.

CAESAR, TO THE YOUNG SINGER, HIS WORDS MEANT FOR CLEOPATRA:

Young man, do you know this of Catullus?

Give me a thousand and a thousand kisses

When we have many thousands more,

we will scramble them to get the score,

So envy will not know how high the count

And cast its evil eye.

Several scenes later, once Cupid’s work is done and Caesar and Cleopatra are lovers, she lies back on her bed and volunteers, “I’ve been reading your commentaries, about your campaigns in Gaul.” He, skeptical: “And does my writing compare with Catullus?” She, suggestively: “Well, it’s [slight pause] different?” “Duller?” he asks. “Well, perhaps a little too much description.”

Unlike today’s audiences, those watching the film in 1963, including Dylan, would have gotten these references. Ancient Rome and its spoken language, Latin, the biggest language club at Hibbing High and elsewhere, used to be much more relevant. As late as January 28, 1974, the cover of Newsweek could show Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, and Rosemary Woods encoiled by the Watergate tapes in an image that was a clear allusion to the twin snakes in Virgil’s Aeneid that devour the Trojan priest Laocoön, who is trying to urge his people not to bring the Greeks’ fateful horse into the city. Readers of Newsweek, Dylan included, would have gotten it, either from their knowledge of Virgil or of the ancient statue of the scene, now in the Vatican. Until 1928, enrollments in Latin language courses in the United States outstripped all other languages combined. Spanish took over as the years went by, but in 1962 there were still 702,000 students studying the ancient language. Sputnik, the Cold War, and the perceived need for more science and practicality in U.S. school curricula put an end to all that. The decline began when the National Defense Education Act of 1958 omitted Latin from the curriculum—a year after Bob Zimmerman had been in Latin class at Hibbing High. It took some time to see the full effects of that measure, but by 1976 the number of Latin students had dropped sharply to 150,000, helped by the difficult nature of the language, along with its association with the church, discipline, and authority. Latin hardly fit the ethos of the counterculture.

The paradox here is that Catullus’s poetry is in fact completely modern in the themes and sentiments it expresses. Those who understand his work read it for the beauty and the music of his verse, for the intensity of the personal voice, and for solace when they have loved and lost. Catullus was among the most-read poets of a number of the Beat poets. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, laureate poet of Victorian England, visiting the ruins of Catullus’s house on Lake Garda in northern Italy, thought of Catullus’s poem to his dead brother: “Came that ‘Ave atque vale’ [hail and farewell] of the poet’s hopeless woe / Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago.” The historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) could not read Catullus’s Poem 8 without weeping. It has been a favorite since Thomas Campion, the poet, musician, and doctor, translated it and put it to music in the early seventeenth century. Unlike many in our age, Campion obviously saw no distinction between poem and song. The poem is a self-address, urging strength and resolve, after the loss of Lesbia’s love:

Poor Catullus, you should stop being a fool!

Should realize what you see is lost is gone for good.

Bright were the suns that once shone once for you

When you would go wherever she would lead you.

That girl loved as no other will ever be.

Many playful things happened then,

Things you wished and she then wanted too.