“WHY BOB DYLAN MATTERS”

By Richard F. Thomas

Dey Street ($24.99)

Those who thank Bob Dylan for the soundtrack of their youth will love “Why Bob Dylan Matters,” a lively work of scholarship by Richard F. Thomas, a classics professor at Harvard University whose Dylan course is one of the most popular on campus.

Those who came to Bob Dylan later — some, perhaps because their parents insisted on playing his albums — also would enjoy Mr. Thomas’ erudite journey through Dylan’s songs, utterances, performances and personae, both public and private.

Mr. Thomas’ personable style turns what might have been a purely academic exercise into a journey as entertaining as it is enlightening.

“This is a book about Bob Dylan, the genius of my lifetime in his artistic use of the English language, and of its song traditions — just as surely as [T.S.] Eliot was the poetic genius of the first half of the 20th century,” he writes. An avid Dylan fan who travels far for a Dylan concert, Mr. Thomas tracks Mr. Dylan from high school days in Hibbing, Minn., where he was a member of the Latin club, through relationships, concerts, interviews and his numerous “stages.” Mr. Dylan began as a folksinger, arguably invented folk-rock, became an electrified, hard-charging oracle, dipped into country, briefly was a Christian true believer and, toward the end of the 1990s, emerged a wiser, older man.

Bob Dylan is a man of many masks whose use of language is singularly allusive and timeless. Mr. Thomas’ argument — his book is a rebuttal to those who groused that Mr. Dylan didn’t deserve a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 — is that Dylan is the poet of our times, a worthy successor to Eliot, who wrote that “immature poets borrow; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

Mr. Thomas addresses Eliot’s dictum thoroughly, suggesting Bob Dylan’s incorporation of older language is not only creative, it’s hidden in plain sight for those who know where to look. Mr. Dylan, to Mr. Thomas, is an exemplar of intertextuality.

“Allusion, reference, plagiarism — these are all names for the phenomenon known as ‘intertextuality,’ a term that is most convenient in its neutrality for describing the process by which poets, songwriters, painters, composers, or artists of any genre produce new meaning through the creative reuse of existing texts, images, or sound,” he writes. “In its truest sense, intertextuality is as far as you can get from plagiarism, which is a practice meant to escape notice. Plagiarism is about passing off as your own what belongs to others.” 

Mr. Thomas first apprehended Mr. Dylan’s poetic lineage on Sept. 11, 2001, the day the Twin Towers fell and the day Dylan released the album, “Love and Theft.” Mr. Thomas “heard” Virgil in lines from the tune, “Lonesome Day Blues.” The recognition effectively launched Mr. Thomas’ quest: to rightfully place Mr. Dylan in a bardic line dating back to before Christ.

An authority on classical Greek and Roman poetry in addition to being a leading Dylanologist, Mr. Thomas connects the perpetually controversial Dylan to Virgil, Horace, Catullus and Homer, showing how Mr. Dylan’s lyrics transfigure and pay homage to their classical antecedents.

He also shows how more contemporary poets like the French surrealists Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud are recast and perpetuated by Mr. Dylan – who, of course, would never admit to such channeling.

Mr. Thomas particularly celebrates Mr. Dylan’s later work, from 1997’s startlingly brilliant “Time Out of Mind” to the Great American Songbook trilogy he launched in 2015 with “Shadows in the Night,” a smooth, downsized album of Frank Sinatra covers.

Don’t look to this book for musical criticism, however. Mr. Thomas sticks to language. While he takes pains to not accuse Mr. Dylan of textual plagiarism, Mr. Thomas doesn’t look at his musical appropriations, like the wholesale lifting of Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” riff behind “Early Roman Kings,” among the most vivid tunes on “Tempest,” the 2012 release that was the last to feature original songs. Mr. Dylan’s use of familiar melodies — and claims of song authorship — also permeate such relatively obscure and spare albums as “Good as I Been to You” and “World Gone Wrong,” released in 1992 and 1993 respectively.

Mr. Thomas, a lover of language above all, comes to Mr. Dylan, whom he has never interviewed, to praise and to parse him, celebrating the way his uniquely resonant language perpetuates the humanistic tradition. He does so eloquently.

Carlo Wolff is a Cleveland-based freelance writer.

First Published: December 10, 2017, 1:23 p.m.