The author of Why Dylan Matters is the Harvard Classicist and ‘Dylanologist’ T., better known to readers of this journal for his considerable work on Virgil. T.’s scholarly bona fides serve as both the intellectual rationale and the sales pitch for this post-Nobel apologia, which seeks to make good on the Swedish Academy's announcement of Dylan's win in terms that hailed him as heir to the Classical poets, a modern Sappho or Homer. Notwithstanding the cover blurb's affirmation that, as T. urges, ‘Dylan's poetry deserves comparison with Virgil's’, however, this may not be the book to convince the unconvinced that Dylan merits a place on the stage of world literature (let me be clear: I think he does).

Following four chapters that mix Dylan-centric memoir and anecdotal Dylan biography, liberally spiced with Classical reference and comparison, Chapter 5 seems to signal a shift towards more detailed consideration of ‘intertextuality’, which T. defines as ‘the process by which poets, songwriters, painters, composers, or artists of any genre produce new meaning through the creative reuse of existing texts, images, or sound’ (p. 131). The procedures undertaken to illuminate this process are fine as far as they go, but that is not always as far as might be hoped. In a representative piece of commentary, for instance, T. reads Dylan's ‘Fourth Time Around’ as echoing and answering the Lennon-penned Beatles track ‘Norwegian Wood’, itself understood to be written under Dylan's influence. In what will become an overused visual tactic, T. displays ‘the relevant lyrics of the two songs side by side’, highlighting key words (p. 147):

Here, says T., ‘Dylan outdoes, accentuates, overloads with rhymes, and on one level … [parodies] the simple rhyme of the Beatles’ (pp. 146–7). Following the side-by-side quotation, he adds: ‘If you accept the fact that Dylan's song is directed at Lennon and the Beatles, Dylan's “I never asked for your crutch / Now don't ask for mine” is devastating. He's essentially telling the Beatles, “Stay away from what I'm doing”’ (p. 147). T.’s remarks hinge on the tradition that ‘Fourth Time Around’ is a riposte to Lennon, though it bears noting that Dylan's song-writing of this period frequently involves piling up deliberate rhymes, as in the imagistic masterpiece ‘It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)’ on Bringing It All Back Home (in which Dylan rhymes noon/spoon/balloon/moon/soon in the first verse, for instance). The extract also misrepresents the shape of Dylan's song: perhaps an ellipse has simply gone missing, but there lacks any indication that ten lines have been left out between the lover's chastisement ‘Don't get cute’ and the speaker's musing on ‘that picture of you in your wheelchair’.

And what about that striking embedded image? If we accept that Dylan is indeed responding to ‘Norwegian Wood’ in this song, there may be more relevance in Dylan's lyrics than T. lets on. The uncertain fidgeting of Lennon's speaker (‘I sat on a rug biding my time / Drinking her wine’) is carried over in ‘Fourth Time Around’ to both speaker and lover (him standing, humming, tapping, her buttoning and straightening), but the lightly enigmatic touch Lennon gives to his vignette is exaggerated in Dylan's song to the point that Dylan's characters become unintelligible to each other and to us: ‘Your words aren't clear / You'd better spit out your gum’, a joke about Dylan's singing, but also a self-reflexive wink at the opacity of the lyrics themselves. As the speaker wonders about that picture in the hallway, the song's listener wonders in turn about the meaning of the scene being narrated. Dylan's ‘creative reuse’ of what he reads, hears and sees extends beyond mere citation, deep into the weird alchemy of his art.

In order to get to the heart of the book's engagement with Dylan and Classical literature, we must first consider this questionable claim: ‘There is not much intertextuality in Dylan's work in the decades during and after his retirement from performance in 1966’ and ‘the release of his 1997 album, Time Out of Mind’ (p. 161). This is not really the place for a lecture on semiotics, but most literary theorists would say that ‘intertextuality’ is not a quality that can be turned on or off, it is a quality of all writing, indeed a quality of language itself, which comes to us saturated with the entire history of its previous uses. It may be that the 21 studio albums Dylan released between 1966 and 1997 are intertextual in ways different from those of the early 1960s and those of Dylan's late-career renaissance, but the nature of that difference is a matter of systematic investigation, not casual assertion. What T. seems more narrowly to mean is that it is in Time Out of Mind and subsequent recordings that Dylan's affinity for and creative reuse of Classical literature is most overt. Readers will have to take his word for it.

T. does eventually get round to his main subject of Dylan's ‘transfigurations’ of and by the Classics, the best-documented example of which is a tissue of allusions to Ovid's exile poems in Dylan's 2009 album Together Through Life. This is probably the most successful part of the book, but I still found myself willing T. past the siren song of hard-boiled cliché. An otherwise effective discussion of memory, song and nostalgia in relation to the Tristia and Homer's Odyssey, for example, culminates in the verdict: ‘When Dylan reworks Ovid's line [May the gods grant … / that I'm wrong in thinking you've forgotten me!] in “Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking / That you have forgotten me?” what we have is what we have always had in Dylan, the world gone wrong for the lover’ (p. 248). World Gone Wrong is of course the title of a 1993 album by Dylan, and T. may be picking up on Dylan's own habit of talking about his writing in clichéd terms, as a way of deflecting meaning-mongering. But if we are in the business of making meaning, we are obliged to persist beyond such deflections.

Before reaching its inevitable conclusion in Dylan's laureation, the book pauses to consider Dylan in performance, and it was T.’s serenity about Dylan as performer that crystallised what, for this reviewer, is lacking in T.’s account of Dylan. Describing a concert he attended in Clearwater, Florida, in November 2016, T. writes, ‘As I walked out in the warm November night, most people seemed to be smiling, glowing with warmth at what was an utterly perfect performance from start to finish’. Except for one man, who, T. remarks, ‘was pretty angry: “No fucking country rock!” he exclaimed to the woman he was with. “He was like fucking Lawrence Welk! I slept in my car to do this. Prick!”’ (p. 288). This is surely the most urgent moment in the book, because it forces us to reckon with the fact that Dylan's work of six decades has tended to produce not glowing contentment, but strong, even violent reactions: perhaps the most famous incident in Dylan's storied career is the singer's response to the cry of ‘Judas!’ in between acoustic and electric sets at Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966, instructing his band to ‘Play it fucking loud!’ Dylan, in other words, is difficult; a book that faces directly into that difficulty may not go to number one on Amazon, but it stands a better chance of persuading the faithless why Dylan matters.