The Drifter’s Escape1

This essay examines the conceptions of politics and the political in the song lyrics of Bob Dylan. Dylan’s view of politics and the political world is complex and many-sided but generally bleak, summed up in the lines ‘power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is’. The essay traces different aspects of his view of politics through the many references to politics which appear in his songs, which reveal the deployment of some persistent themes, particularly alienation, and his view that the political world is an alienated world. This is explored through Dylan’s sense of a coming apocalypse (particularly in his religious period), his imagining of the political world as a prison, a graveyard, and an insanity factory, and his sense that the only way to survive is to become an outlaw.