E sim eu sei que eles vêm tomar meu drinque em meu copo a trincar: Bob Dylan, os beats e a contracultura

Abstract

The following text investigates the relations between Bob Dylan’s work and the beat poets’ (especially Allen Ginsberg’s) along with the influxes of the counterculture. Beginning from a well-documented connection between the decisive production of the authors of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Howl”, a study of the poetic traditions which served as historical soil for the production associated to the neo-avant-garde and experimental poetry – especially in the United States in the 1960s – spreads into the reflections of such authors as Susan Sontag (2020) and Herbert Marcuse (1974; 1975), who establish a discussion about the revendicated transformations of the period. In a non—chronological course, fundamental points of contact between Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg within the Rolling Thunder Revue, a multi-artistic tour which has taken place between 1975 and 1976, are made so a shared inheritance from romantic, symbolist and surrealist poetics support a re-reading of the artists’ production in dialogue with the period’s aesthetic, political and social reflections which, by and large, they expressed and supported in their work. Discussing concepts such as Susan Sontag’s (2020) camp (literally a counter-culture), we intend to investigate how the transformation of Bob Dylan into an artist openly associated to the sixties counterculture after an initial insertion into the Greenwich Village’s scene represents one of the most important movements of the artist’s career and, also, one of the most resonant events in the last century’s artistic culture.