Identities of Song

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, the news was met with an array of reactions. On Twitter many hailed the Swedish Academy’s choice: Salman Rushdie called it “great,” and Joyce Carol Oates said it was “inspired & original.” But many also deemed it inappropriate, stating flat out that Dylan’s work isn’t literature: Jodi Picoult mused about her eligibility for a Grammy. Rob Delaney quipped about shortstop Derek Jeter winning a “Tony for his rice pilaf.” To critics, the Academy’s explanation that Dylan merited the Nobel “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” didn’t matter: they took it as self-evident that songs aren’t literature. Some criticisms narrowly equated literature with books, even novels. This vein quickly went off point, if not off the rails: now Philip Roth will never win because this American day was lost; there are plenty of worthy writers from the Third World. But these things could be said whenever any writer wins the Nobel Prize — there are always many others who also deserve it. Somehow critics found Dylan especially blameworthy because, after all, he’s just a song-and-dance man.

Scholars in the US have regarded the American song tradition as part of literature at least since Lead Belly performed at the Modern Language Association Convention in St. Louis in 1933. In Dylan’s case, the inclusion of his lyrics in major poetry anthologies suggests broad recognition of his accomplishment as a poet. However, even this assessment has been narrowly molded: it reduces songs to lyrics, as though the printed poem were the durable point of reference for literary form. Even Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, chimed in with this print-centric notion, saying that “it’s perfectly fine to read his works as poetry.” Anyone who listens to popular music knows that songs are not merely words but, well, music — besides the vocal melody there are harmony parts, chords on various instruments, an arrangement, the many iterations a song sees in the recording studio and in concert. Dylan has long shown more awareness than most musicians of every aspect of his songs as part of a varied yet cohesive performance.

In Bob Dylan’s Poetics, Timothy Hampton doesn’t answer the question of whether the Bard of Hibbing should be a Nobel laureate. But his modest title, which could easily be understood to signal a study of Dylan’s lyrics, turns out to entail a wide definition of poetics. Hampton displays impressive knowledge of several fields, including major experimental trends in Western poetry (the French Renaissance, nineteenth-century French symbolism, the Beat Generation), and the history of blues, folk, and rock. He examines the formal aspects of Dylan’s compositions, how they draw on and rework poetic and musical precursors, how they engage the different sectors of their audience, how the singer reflects on and exploits recording and live performance. Bob Dylan’s Poetics is the best kind of scholarly book: Hampton doesn’t hold back on details or transciplinarity, and his sharply focused interest in the subject results in prose as lively as it is analytic.

Hampton orients his study around the songs. Though he eschews the temptation to foreground biography that mars so many discussions of Dylan, it’s indispensable at many turns: much of Dylan’s material is connected to his involvement in pivotal phenomena like the folk revival, the Civil Rights Movement, and their various aftermaths. Hampton begins with Dylan’s early folk albums, proceeds through his many permutations and affiliations, finishing with the albums leading up to his winning the Nobel Prize. In succinct chapter introductions, Hampton identifies the albums he will discuss. He finds a continuity in Dylan’s poetics from the start: though rear-view mirror commentary is easy, Hampton does far more, taking Dylan’s work on its own terms at each phase but also aware that...