Peter Waddell

Hi Ben I love your podcasts, many of which I have listened to several times, and all of which raise comments and questions in my mind that I feel like throwing into the pot. So here is one... For some time I've wondered about the influence of Walt Whitman's poetry on Bob Dylan's lyrics, especially their shared habit of using lengthy lists. Bob is a poet and a lover of poetry, and he will know American poetry well. With Murder Most Foul, Bob's list is as long as many of Walt's but another possibility has intrigued me: Whitman famously wrote in memorial of the assassinated President Lincoln and, with Bob being young at the time of JFK's death might he have deferred until he came up with something worthy of a national tragedy...but the moment passed? Now, as an elder statesman of American letters and as a Nobel Laureate living in a world where JFK's reforming optimism is increasingly denied and forgotten, Dylan may have felt more comfortable about commenting in his own way about Kennedy's