Why Bob Dylan Matters

June 15, 2017

George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics at Harvard University, Thomas is famed around campus for his ragingly popular freshman seminar on Bob Dylan and his status in the larger world as a prime academic defender of Dylan's genius. This new work doesn't simply examine Dylan's appeal or the deep meaning of his lyrics but tracks his cultural importance and ongoing relevance in today's tumbled-around world. Is Dylan an enduringly great poet on the level of T.S. Eliot or Virgil, as Thomas argues? Let the debate begin.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2017
After all these years and all the songs, do we really need to ask if Nobel laureate Bob Dylan matters? Harvard classics professor Thomas, who teaches a popular freshman seminar on Dylan, believes that we do. He places Dylan beside such classic poets as Homer, Virgil, Sappho, Catullus, Horace, Hesiod, and Ovid. Like them, Dylan, Thomas writes, is incapable of being contained by time or place and explores what it means to be human. Thomas discusses themes that run throughout Dylan's songbook, including social justice, war, love, death, faith, and religion. One of the more thrilling aspects of Thomas' study is his tackling of plagiarism, which Dylan's critics have repeatedly accused him of. He argues persuasively that Dylan is practicing intertextuality, in which artists produce new meaning through the creative reuse of existing texts, images, or sound. Dylan's borrowings are firmly rooted in the folk, blues, and poetry traditions. As T. S. Eliot wrote, mature poets steal. Dylan stole only from the best and in doing so has created powerful and timeless work. Also of great value is Thomas' revealing analysis, a masterstroke of literary detective work, of Dylan's 16-minute-plus opus, Highlands. In sum, this is an exciting examination of an artist's enigmatic mind.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)