‘I’m on the dark side of the road’: Bob Dylan, William Langland, and being already gone

Fourteenth-century alliterative verse and Bob Dylan’s music reflect movement from western towns to eastern cities, clearest for the fourteenth century in the career of William Langland, author of the dream vision Piers Plowman. This essay broaches the comparison for the first time by noting a specific formal tic that both Langland and Dylan found generative at crucial junctures in their respective careers. Dylan and Langland both represent their own absence from their fictions. The Is of Dylan’s songs and Langland’s avatars in Piers Plowman tend to be already gone at the imagined moment of listening or reading. The places, addressees, and personae of Dylan’s and Langland’s art are left behind, shaken off by the peripatetic subject of the work, not as an event in the time of narrative but as if always prior to one’s encounter with the song or the poem. Situated at the intersection of poetic formalism and historical materialism, this essay’s readings connect local details of style to the arcs of careers and social trajectories.