Highway 61 Contains Multitudes

Bob Dylan invokes Walt Whitman in “I Contain Multitudes,” the opening track on Rough and Ready Ways, which the singer released in 2020, after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan channels Whitman, as predecessor and tutelary spirit, implicitly making the case for an American poetic tradition that links Whitman’s nineteenth-century vernacular transcendentalism with the singer’s own 1960s-era beat surrealism. This linkage should come as no surprise when we consider how many times Dylan implicitly and explicitly responds to Whitman’s call throughout work and career. This is not least because both Dylan and Whitman are poets of democracy, albeit in very different ways.