"Nowhere Man" from the Beatles Rubber Soul album, their 6th album and released in 1965, was a low point in that seminal album. Principal writer John Lennon was offering a kind of confession that he'd been a man of many plans but little action, but his strategy to shift the point of  view from confessor to observer is, it seems, catastrophic. I always thought this was one of the weakest things the Beatles ever recorded, seeming to be an obvious effort to write a “message song” in the wake of all the protest music that came before it. The genius of Beatles lyrics was that Lennon and McCartney avoided trying to say “heavy things” deliberately. Both were familiar with contemporary poetry at the time, and it’s my guess that the influence, if any, came from Eliot and Williams, where the messages being delivered, if any, relied on mood, tone, word choice, and the telling detail. "Nowhere Man” eschews all that and puts it out there so the hippies and fellow trend-chasers wouldn’t miss it: “He’s a real nowhere man / Sitting in his nowhere land / Making all his nowhere plans for nobody...” The song has been favorably compared with Eliot’s thematically similar poem “The Hollow Men,” but a side-by-side overview of the song and poem gives Eliot the edge because the poet has the freedom to elaborate on the page the diagnosis he’s chosen to write about. That’s to say, Eliot is frankly better at writing a piece about the shallowness of material pursuits.

The advantage of Eliot is that his poem is in the first person and has a confessional quality. It seems like a collection of private thoughts entertained amid the hustle of modern life, with the poem’s narrator ruing the choices he made and the obligations they created for him. The Beatles’ stanzas are judgmental and present us with a verdict, a quality that has always annoyed me, ever since I bought the album decades ago. In shorter form, I think Eliot’s final lines from his poem summarize what’s wrong with “Nowhere Man”: “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”