Today is the anniversary of the 1959 death of Buddy Holly, along with Richie Valens J.P. Richardson Jr. (“The Big Bopper”), in a plane crash in Iowa.

In honor of the day, I’m publishing a new version of a post I wrote almost eight years ago at The Calvinist International, because it is currently almost impossible to find. (You can find it on archive.org here.)

Poetic Inspiration and the Transmigration of Souls

Memini me fiere pavom…

“I remember that I became a peacock…”

The idea of poetic inspiration has a long pedigree. Homer mentions the inspiration of the Muse at the beginning of both of his epics. Around the same time, Hesiod reported in the Theogony that the Muses had appeared to him:

Once [the Muses] taught Hesiod beautiful song

as he watched his sheep under holy Helikon;

this is the first thing the goddesses told me,

the Olympian Muses, daughters of Zeus Aigiochos:

“Rustic shepherds, evil oafs, nothing but bellies,

we know how to say many lies as if they were true,

and when we want, we know how to speak the truth.”

This is what the prompt-voiced daughters of great Zeus said;

they picked and gave me a staff, a branch of strong laurel,

a fine one, and breathed into me a voice

divine, to celebrate what will be and what was.

They told me to sing the race of the blessed who always are,

but always to sing of themselves first and also last.^[1]

This tradition of direct inspiration from the Muses is carried on by later poets.

But on at least one occasion, it is a poetic predecessor himself who appears to his epigone. In the now lost Roman epic by Ennius called the Annales, of which only fragments survive, the author began by relating a dream in which the ghost of Homer appeared to him to announce that his soul had transmigrated into him in the form of a peacock.

The satirist Persius gives an account in Satires 6.9-11:

“Good people, get to know the port of Luna–it’s worth it!”

So said Ennius the wise, on snoring off the dream

of being Quintus Homer descended from Pythagoras’ peacock.^[2]

A scholiast on Persius comments:

That is what Ennius says in the beginning of his Annales where he states that in the course of a dream he saw a vision of Homer who said that he was once a peacock and from it, according to a rule laid down by the philosopher Pythagoras, his soul had been conveyed into Ennius.

This tale itself is perhaps based on the story of the transmigration of the soul of Euphorbus into the philosopher Pythagoras (note the mentions of Pythagoras in both Persius and his scholiast).

I suspect that Bob Dylan knows about this story, and drew on it in his 2017 lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

That wasn’t the first time Dylan had mentioned Holly. At the Grammys in 1998, where Dylan won three awards for Time Out of Mind, after winning Album of the Year, he had said:^[3]

I just wanted to say that when I was about 16 or 17 years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him…and he looked at me. And I just have some kind of feeling that he was — I don’t know how or why — but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.

The glance of Holly that transitions into his presence during the making of the album: Already this is suggestive of Homer and Ennius.

But the Nobel lecture is even more explicit. There, he says this:

If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about eighteen and he was twenty-two. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related, like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and blues. Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but once, and that was a few days before he was gone. I had to travel a hundred miles to get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed.

He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than twenty-two. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.

I think it was a day or two after that that his plane went down. 

The similarities seem too great to be coincidental. The Nobel speech ends with the idea of Homeric poetic inspiration (the final sentence is “I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story”); I suggest that he begins the speech with this story for the same reason.

For notice where this anecdote falls: right at the outset of the speech, where Dylan is giving his poetic and musical bona fides. As we know from the poetic tradition, the incipit or proem is the appropriate place to relate one’s source of inspiration, and thus one’s possession of authority to speak. And note as well the similarities to Ennius’ vision: an older, established poet-musician somehow transferring his artistic mojo into a younger up-and-comer. In Ennius the predecessor is already a ghost; in Dylan, he will be in a couple days–as Dylan himself points out. And is a cricket really so different from a peacock?

In a speech about literature and music–about the Muse and her mouthpieces–Dylan appropriates the classical literary tradition going all the way back to its beginnings. It shouldn’t go unnoticed that by doing so he creates a place for himself in its Best Of list.

Homer as Ennius as Buddy Holly as Bob Dylan.

Pace Don McLean, the music never really dies; it just takes up residence somewhere else.