When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, it felt like everybody had an opinion on it. From bloggers to literary critics - all of a sudden verdicts on Dylan's literary weight were given everywhere. Amongst those who defended this artistry was Richard F. Thomas, Harvard classics professor and teacher of a course on Dylan. In Why Dylan Matters he makes an argument for why he belongs in the pantheon of classical poets.

I'm not one of these people who grew up with Bob Dylan's music. When I became a conscious listener of music, Dylan had already been around for decades. To me, he had always been who he is now: a legend. And still, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, I did see why some people didn't feel like he belonged in the pantheon alongside Faulkner and Hemingway, which was why I was interested in hearing an educated opinion.

I should have expected it, but this was a way more analytical argument than I was hoping for. Thomas is both an academic and a fan, which makes his writing educated, I wasn't quite able to feel compelled or engaged by the points he was making. In his essays he points out similarities to Virgil, Ovid and Homer and draws comparisons by saying that both, the ancients and Dylan, explore the essential question of what it means to be human.

A question that I found compelling was who gets to define what great literature actually is. Is it only something that gets written down, something that is valued by literate societies, taught in schools or preserved in libraries? Isn't music, and Dylan's music respectively, something that human communities need just as much and don't they convey the same things?

Having all of that said, for somebody who is more of a casual listener of Dylan's musical repertoire than a passionate fan, this was a bit too lengthy. A mere essay would have probably satisfied my curiosity and it's therefore a book that I would only recommend to people with prior knowledge of (and enthusiasm for) Bob Dylan's art and history.

'I've been sitting down studying the art of love | I think it will fit me like a glove.' (Thunder on the Mountain)

The only Art of Love I knew was the three-book poem of Roman poet Ovid, a playful early work, a 'how-to' for those looking to get and keep a romantic partner. But Modern Times didn't seem to have much to do with that poem, but rather, if anything, with the last poems Ovid wrote.


This extract epitomises what I both liked about this book and yet also highlights its weaknesses: on one hand Thomas takes Dylan seriously as a lyricist and argues that there's no necessary distinction between poetry and song lyric: after all, as he points out, ancient and classical poetry was often sung rather than merely read, and Orpheus, the model of the poet as vates, was famous for his singing to a lyre accompaniment. That accepted, reading Dylan's lyrics intertextually makes perfect sense and that's what Thomas claims to be doing.

The problem, though, is that rather than reading or analysing intertexts, Thomas merely identifies them, and sometimes those identifications are very loose. In the example above, he claims Ovid's Ars Amatoria from Dylan's direct reference but then jumps to his Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto instead; and the only real analysis is the rather vague claim that Dylan adopts the mask of nostalgic exile from Ovid. Oh, but then Thomas claims that Dylan also takes similar tropes from Homer's Odysseus, and the Beat poets, and perhaps Dante exiled from Florence...

The blurb focuses on Dylan's classicism, but actually the book touches on all kinds of other literary influences: Shakespeare, Thomas Campion, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Plutarch. As already noted, though, Thomas notes them in passing, doesn't analyse what they might be doing in, and for, Dylan's lyrics.

There are places where he even undermines his own tentative arguments: 'Dylan did not need Ovid in order to bring out the nostalgia of remembering; indeed most of these instances above are from songs written before he read Green's 1994 translation. But in Ovid he found a kindred spirit.' It's simply not enough to state, for example, that both Dylan and Catullus took their greatest inspiration from unhappy love - it's no doubt true, but that doesn't mean that Dylan was influenced by Catullus, and there are many, many poets and poems that equally articulate the sufferings of love.

For all my disappointment in the scholarly aspects of the book (and it's clear to see why this hasn't been published by an academic press) I really enjoyed reading it - Thomas' sensitivity to Dylan and his lyrics comes through strongly, and his sharing of his love and knowledge makes this addictively readable. As a mere Dylan neophyte I learned a huge amount and, perhaps most importantly, it sent me back to Dylan's music. I just think the blurb makes it sound like a different book from what it actually is.

Why Dylan Matters is undoubtedly very erudite and it has its interesting facets, but I do have my doubts about the thrust of it.

Richard Thomas is a classicist and Dylan fan who really knows his stuff about both. In this series of essays, he analyses both the content and social impact of Dylan's music often (but not exclusively) with reference to its parallels with classical texts by people like Virgil, Cicero, Ovid and so on. It's interesting for a while, but I have to say that I got a little bogged down in it, especially as I felt that some of what was being said was a bit tenuous. It felt at times like the converse of one of those sort of "Virgil's Relevance Today" seminars; yes, we know that some central themes recur throughout literature and remain true through ages, but that doesn't necessarily make Dylan directly comparable to Virgil, even if some of the writings of each has echoes of the other.

I have only a reasonable general knowledge of Classics and am a Dylan fan rather than an expert, so I may not be qualified to judge, but my sense is that Dylan's lyrics are often so brilliantly out of the ordinary that it's almost impossible to pin them down with any exactitude. This, to me, is much of their greatness, in that they convey and evoke profound ideas and feelings in a very oblique way. Given this, I think it would be possible for someone in all sorts of disciplines to draw parallels; if a particle physicist claimed that the last verse of All Along The Watchtower discusses quantum indeterminacy, for example, or an economist said that It's All Over Now, Baby Blue is actually analysing the causes of recession, it would be hard to refute them completely. I exaggerate, of course, but I did feel that there is more than a hint here of a classicist imposing his own discipline on the songs rather than allowing the songs to develop their own meaning.

These reservations aside, I did find the essays readable and quite enjoyable if I took them one at a time. There is enough here to interest a Dylan fan, but I can only give Why Dylan Matters a qualified recommendation.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)