The Literature Network - He may look like a rock star, but he's really a people's poet; Robert Coles argues that Springsteen sings in the tradition of Walt Whitman.(FEATURES)(BOOKS)

He may look like a rock star, but he's really a people's poet; Robert Coles argues that Springsteen sings in the tradition of Walt Whitman.(FEATURES)(BOOKS)

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From: The Christian Science Monitor
Date: 20031216
Author:

Byline: Timothy C. Davis

The concept of songwriter as poet has been around for some time. And ever since a youngster named Robert Zimmerman decided to leave his home in Minnesota to seek fame under a new moniker, Bob Dylan, people have been calling pop stars "poets."

Robert Coles, the Pulitzer Prize- winning psychiatrist at Harvard University, has no problem with this trend. Poetry, he suggests, didn't go underground in the late '50s and early '60s - it went overground, to jukeboxes and concert halls, and anywhere young people congregated to share their passions and pain. ...

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He may look like a rock star, but he's really a people's poet; Robert Coles argues that Springsteen sings in the tradition of Walt Whitman.(FEATURES)(BOOKS)

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