Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* After all these years and all the songs, do we really need to ask if Nobel laureate Bob Dylan matters? Harvard classics professor Thomas, who teaches a popular freshman seminar on Dylan, believes that we do. He places Dylan beside such classic poets as Homer, Virgil, Sappho, Catullus, Horace, Hesiod, and Ovid. Like them, Dylan, Thomas writes, is incapable of being contained by time or place and explores what it means to be human. Thomas discusses themes that run throughout Dylan's songbook, including social justice, war, love, death, faith, and religion. One of the more thrilling aspects of Thomas' study is his tackling of plagiarism, which Dylan's critics have repeatedly accused him of. He argues persuasively that Dylan is practicing intertextuality, in which artists produce new meaning through the creative reuse of existing texts, images, or sound. Dylan's borrowings are firmly rooted in the folk, blues, and poetry traditions. As T. S. Eliot wrote, mature poets steal. Dylan stole only from the best and in doing so has created powerful and timeless work. Also of great value is Thomas' revealing analysis, a masterstroke of literary detective work, of Dylan's 16-minute-plus opus, Highlands. In sum, this is an exciting examination of an artist's enigmatic mind.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
