Bob Dylan contains multitudes: Walt Whitman as Dylan's muse on "Murder Most Foul"

Dylanologists had to work overtime in March with the sudden appearance of "Murder Most Foul," a 17-minute track revolving around the Kennedy assassination and packed with allusions to 20th-century music and pop culture. Which makes the title of Dylan's follow-up track, "I Contain Multitudes," all the more intriguing — as English majors everywhere will recall, the phrase occurs near the end of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself": Do I contradict myself? But naturally, he sounds even more like Whitman on "Multitudes," as he calmly, almost wistfully, explains all he contains: 24 of the song's 44 lines begin with "I" or "I'll": I'm just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones And them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones I go right to the edge, I go right to the end I go where all things lost are made good again I sing the Songs of Experience like William Blake I have no apologies to make Everything's flowing all at the same time I live on a boulevard of crime I drive fast cars, I eat fast foods, I contain multitudes. While Dylan's pose as a 21st-century Whitman is something of a new development, his affinity for mid-nineteenth-century American literature and culture — a period known to scholars as the "American Renaissance" — spans his career. Just as he was going electric in 1965, Dylan riffed on "Moby-Dick" with "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," a six-and-a-half-minute postmodern epic featuring Captain A-rab's abandoned pursuit of a whale.