The Poetry of Bob Dylan

Through short essays, leading poetry critics and Bob Dylan experts analyse songs from a range of perspectives to illuminate the songs’ poetic and literary character.

An innovative resource for Bob Dylan fans and scholars alike, these thirty essays by leading scholars of poetry, music, and literature illustrate how and why the work of the 2016 Nobel Literature Laureate is in fact so literary. Examining how Dylan’s lyrics shape or get shaped by vocalisation, performance, instrumentation, film, recording technologies, and the forces of history unfolding around him, this collection models a range of ways to understand the songs as poetical phenomena by answering questions like:

How can we read and understand Dylan’s lyrics as poetry? How do those lyrics build on, dialogue with, and expand the poetic tradition? How does Dylan’s style change over time while both pushing and responding to changes in the world of popular music?

Collecting archival research, close reading, musical analysis, and various modes of cultural criticism under one cover, The Poetry of Bob Dylan: Thirty Essays on Thirty Songs stakes a claim to Dylan’s central place in the history of American poetry.