Last month, I commented on Twitter that “[t]he loss of directness in poetry that accompanied the rise of literary modernism is, in fact, a real loss.” In a follow-up remark, I said that “[o]ne can still find such directness after the 1920s—simple as a daisy is simple—but one must generally leave ‘poetry’ and go elsewhere, to people like Hank Williams, to do so.”

I’d been reading the poems of A.E. Housman in recent weeks, and that was the main thing that had prompted my comment. There is a directness of address in Housman’s poetry, a seeming lack of artifice that is itself artifice, that I don’t find in someone like Wallace Stevens (whom I love). But I find it in Williams’s lyrics.

Consider the following verses (I at first had written “stanzas”) from “Men with Broken Hearts,” on Luke the Drifter:^[1]

You’ll meet many just like me upon life’s busy street
With shoulders stooped and heads bowed low
And eyes that stare in defeat
Or souls that live within the past where sorrow plays all parts
Where a living death is all that’s left for men with broken hearts

You’ve never walked in that man’s shoes
Or saw things through his eyes
Or stood and watched with helpless hands
While the heart inside you dies
Some were paupers some were kings
And some were masters of the arts
But in their shame they’re all the same
These men with broken hearts

Is it hard to imagine these words in Housman’s mouth? Not really.

Bob Dylan seems to have noticed something similar about Williams’s lyrical prowess. In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan talks about Luke the Drifter:

The Luke the Drifter record, I just about wore out. That’s the one where he sings and recites parables, like the Beatitudes. I could listen to the Luke the Drifter record all day and drift away myself, become totally convinced in the goodness of man. When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems sacrilege.

He then says this:

In time, I became aware that in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars and they had to be there.^[2] Even his words—all of his syllables are divided up so they make perfect mathematical sense.^[3] You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records, and I listened to them a lot and had them internalized. In a few years’ time, Robert Shelton, the folk and jazz critic for the New York Times, would review one of my performances and would say something like, “resembling a cross between a choirboy and a beatnik…he breaks all the rules in songwriting, except that of having something to say.” The rules, whether Shelton knew it or not, were Hank’s rules, but it wasn’t like I ever meant to break them. It’s just that what I was trying to express was beyond the circle.

Finally, to tie up these various strands, we might think of a Dylan album like John Wesley Harding, which adopts and adapts the kind of lyrical directness and artful artlessness that characterize Housman and Williams. And what do we find? We find Dylan channeling Williams, from the same song quoted above. “Men with Broken Hearts” concludes with these words:

Life sometimes can be so cruel that a heart will pray for death
God why must these living dead know pain with every breath
So help your brother along the road no matter where he starts
For the God that made you made them too these men with broken hearts

Dylan takes this and transforms it in the following way in the conclusion of “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” a song which itself evokes the spoken style of the Williams track:

Well, the moral of the story
The moral of this song
Is simply that one should never be
Where one does not belong
So when you see your neighbor carryin’ somethin’
Help him with his load
And don’t go mistaking Paradise
For that home across the road

The allusion is subtle—”brother” becomes “neighbor”; “help…along the road” becomes “help…with his load,” substituting a word that rhymes with “road” while displacing that word to the end of the verse—but I believe it is there.

Anyway, the point of all this was to trace the continuation of pre-modernist poetic sensibilities, not in the “high” tradition of capital-L “Literature,” but rather in the “low” tradition of American songwriting.^[4] If you want the lyrical frankness of a Housman, look to men like Williams and Dylan.