SOURCE: Klier, Ron. “Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and the Anxiety of Influence.” The Midwest Quarterly 40, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 334-50.

In the following essay, Klier describes Bob Dylan as the most recent in a line of popular American poets, from Walt Whitman to Woody Guthrie, who are “singers of democracy.”

Hank Lazer has written that “because of the range, ambition, freedom, and magnitude of Walt Whitman's work, as well as the attractive model of Whitman's persistence as a poet, it is to be expected that nearly every contemporary poet of some stature will, at one time or another, bow respectfully to Walt Whitman's direction” (1). In “Walt Whitman: American Prophet-Singers and Their People,” Richard Pascal extends Whitman's influence into the world of popular music, and more specifically, into the world of Woody Guthrie.

Pascal insists that “the prevalence of Whitmanesque ideas, attitudes, and imagery throughout Guthrie's work leaves little...