Who Is Bob Dylan?

A poet? A rock star? Something else entirely? Dana Stevens argues (NYT) that “creative activity at a certain level renders genre categorization moot”:

Dylan’s songs at their best seem to originate from some primal foundry of creation, a Devil’s crossroads where Delta blues, British folk ballads, French Symbolism and Beat poetry (to name only a few of his early influences) converge and fuse. But his music reaches forward in time, toward more modern art forms, as well. There’s something distinctly cinematic, for example, in the crosscutting and temporal leaps of a narrative ballad like “Tangled Up in Blue,” which compresses a feature film’s worth of images, locations and encounters into four and a half minutes of bravura storytelling. If it’s a kind of sung movie, “Tangled Up in Blue” is one that, like so many Dylan compositions, consciously aspires to the condition of literature. In one verse, an erudite topless-bar waitress hands the first-person narrator — or in some versions of the song, a third-person stand-in — a life-changing volume of verse by “an Italian poet / From the 13th century.”

Francine Prose likewise emphasizes Dylan’s category-defying art:

The Dylan songs I keep returning to are the ones that spin out images like a surrealist or expressionist film, like Buñuel’s “Andalusian Dog” crossed with “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones? “Visions of Johanna” may be our most accurate, haunting evocation of the semi-hallucinatory insomnia that can be an unfortunate side effect of love. Perhaps I have a weakness for songs about the apocalypse (another favorite is Exuma’s “22nd Century,” performed by Nina Simone), but I’ve always admired “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” Dylan’s images cascading in the cadence of a children’s rhyming game: a partridge in a pear tree in a post-nuclear hell. Dylan is a master not only at translating rage into song (“Positively 4th Street” and “Idiot Wind” come to mind), but also at convincing us we’ve felt exactly the same kind of anger he’s describing.

He’s the heir, the unlikely offspring of Arthur Rimbaud and Walt Whitman. But he’s neither Rimbaud nor Whitman. He’s Bob Dylan. Is he a poet or a songwriter? The same answer applies: He’s Bob Dylan. I find myself falling back (again!) on Emily Dickinson’s remark: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Dylan’s songs can make us feel that pleasurable shock of being partially decapitated by beauty.