UPDATE: Please email [email protected] for the PDF of the poems.
Fifteen pages of autograph poems written by the teenage Bob Dylan, taken from his circa 1960 'Poems Without Titles' penned while at the University of Minnesota. All written in pencil, each poem is signed "Dylan" or "Dylanism"—with multiple poems written on some pages, the group contains a total of 24 poems with early Bob Dylan signatures (21 as "Dylan" and three as "Dylanism"). The lot additionally includes Dylan's hand-drawn "Poems Without Titles" cover sheet.
When Bobby Zimmerman arrived at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in the autumn of 1959, he was 18 years old and already intent on becoming a celebrated singer-songwriter. To do this, he immersed himself in the folk music clubs, record stores, and bookshops of the funky Dinkytown neighborhood near the University, planning to, as he wrote in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One, “trade in his electric guitar for an acoustic, and begin surveying the depths of roots music, both new and old[.]”
He also read as much poetry as he could find, and was particularly influenced by the Beat poets and those from whom they had learned. Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti all shape Dylan’s “Poems Without Titles,” as do Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Allen Ginsberg.
One night before going on stage to perform folk songs at the 10 O’Clock Scholar, in late 1959 or early 1960, the young man renamed himself “Bob Dylan.” His fascination with his new name is literally on every page of “Poems Without Titles”; he is clearly enjoying the novelty of it as he writes it, and even refers to a string of zingy aphorisms as “Dylanisms.”
Goofy, witty, sexy, raunchy, reflective, and wise, “Poems Without Titles” are among the earliest surviving writings by Dylan. What they reveal of his tremendous career to come, his 2016 Nobel Laureateship in Literature, and the lyrics he is still writing at 80, are matchless and of vital importance to both literary and music scholarship, and to cultural history.
Notes: one page from Dylan's 'Poems Without Titles' was previously sold separately; this group otherwise represents the complete early work.
Please email [email protected] for the PDF of the poems.
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