Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work by Timothy Hampton (review)

Bob Dylan, as both an artist and an individual, has long proven notoriously hard to categorize. The famed singer– songwriter is a shapeshifter so elusive that the 2007 biopic I’m Not There employed six different actors (each representing a “different” Bob Dylan) in its attempt to capture something of his essence. Partially, this is a consequence of Dylan’s longevity: in a musical career spanning nearly six decades, evolution is inevitable. Partially, it is an artistic necessity: Dylan frequently reacted to the current political and social climate in his work, and as this changed over time, so did the songs. And partially, this multifariousness is a result of Dylan’s reticence and purposeful ambiguity regarding his own life and work. As Timothy Hampton notes toward the end of Bob Dylan’s Poetics, “Dylan has always wanted to have it both ways: to be famous but to retain his privacy; to be taken seriously, but not examined too closely; to be popular, but not mainstream” (p. 206). For all these reasons and more, scholars approaching Dylan’s corpus often take as entrée the indisputable biographical facts, seeking to tie each “new Dylan”—the progressive folk singer, the sardonic rock-and-roller, the evangelical firebrand, and so forth—to a pivotal event in the artist’s life. These biographical events provide solid ground from which more speculative analytical forays might be launched.

In this volume, Hampton illuminates another path. Rather than focusing on Dylan’s life (biographical information is dispensed only sparingly, in brief incipits at the beginning of each chapter), he instead digs deeply into the song lyrics themselves, searching for patterns in their imagery, vocabulary, vernacular, and characterization. In so doing, Hampton makes a compelling case that Dylan’s chameleonic career can be understood as a succession of artistic problems to be solved—that each “new Dylan” can be explained (at least partially) as a response to the limitations of the last. This is not an encompassing approach, nor is it meant to be. As Hampton acknowledges, “This is not . . . to advocate for a kind of evolutionary or ‘narrative’ model of Dylan’s work. The point here has not been to write a disguised biography or portrait of the composer via the songs” (p. 228). As a complement to more customary approaches, however, Hampton’s volume will be a useful resource for Dylan scholars and enthusiasts.

Bob Dylan’s Poetics is organized chronologically. Hampton divides Dylan’s output into six loose periods and treats each over the course of a chapter, noting trends that characterize each era and subjecting two or three songs per chapter to in-depth analysis. The first chapter, “Containing Multitudes,” explores Dylan’s forging of a new style of folk music that moved away from the collectivism of Woody Guthrie and others toward a more individualistic style grounded in a specific approach to language and storytelling. Hampton observes that Dylan’s tendency to toggle rapidly between different vernaculars—the “hobo voice,” the “archaic voice,” and so on—elevates the lyrics from the realm of cliché. “Because his style is combinatory, rather than dramatic, dialogic rather than pastiche, it leaves space for his singing persona to dip in and out of different identities, while never allowing itself to be enclosed in any one” (p. 38). Dylan’s purported wisdom and authority as a folk narrator (he was, after all, a college dropout from Minnesota) was also established through his skillful co-opting of language. “Dylan’s authority . . . involves not only a blending of linguistic registers, but the use of those registers to create . . . a collective world in which the singer’s struggles and our struggles are the same” (p. 39). This ability to summon the illusion of community is, in Hampton’s analysis, largely how Dylan distinguished himself in the crowded Greenwich Village folk...