According to Patrick Kavanagh every great poet is a monster who eats up everything and Shakespeare was an artist who left nothing for those who came after him.
Kavanghs words ring true in the case of Bob Dylan who becomes an octogenarian next Monday. Throughout the long span of his career Dylan has been voraciously soaking up all he could out of the rapidly aging eras he has lived through, transforming his view of the world into a voluminous songbook that now and in the future will sound both ancient and modern and hold its place in literary as well as musical history.
He cited Homer in his Nobel Prize speech but perhaps more relevant was his nod to the Tudor poet and playwright when he received the MusiCares award in 2015: These songs of mine, theyre like mystery stories, the kind that Shakespeare saw when he was growing up. I think you could trace what I do back that far.
David Bowie heard ‘a voice like sand and glue’ and the poet Philip Larkin one that was ‘cawing and derisive’
Telling stories and creating mysteries sums up what Dylan has been doing since he first set out on Highway 61 to change forever the literature of song. In any number of his epic ballads and talking blues songs he combines the storytellers art with the kind of lyric mysteries we might associate with the poets fighting in the captains tower.
Even before that decisive moment in August 1962 when the 21-year-old Minnesotan Robert Alan Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, he possessed a command of language and insights into grassroots American reality that was to shape the ballads that made Joan Baez and others pay attention.
The Dylan who began as a streetwise follower of his hero Woody Guthrie and innovator of the folk tradition, through his voice-of-experience songs, was whether he liked it or perceived as a spokesman for those seeking political and social change in America.
Both the anti-war and civil rights movements heard the messages in much of his early song-writing and recruited it and him to their causes. When Martin Luther King made his I Had a Dream speech Dylan was close by. His emergence on the folk scene and that watershed moment of the civil rights movement was perhaps a fateful concurrence.
He has been adamant in rejecting any notion that he was the voice or conscience of young America in the Sixties or of having any role in the movements of that era, and Dylans denials can be vehement, as the recipient of the one delivered in It Aint Me Babe discovered. When the 1970s brought an end to his domestic bliss and Blood on the Tracks acclaimed a masterpiece, he denied that its lacerating songs had any connection to his marriage break-up, insisting they were based solely on the stories of Chekhov.
Bob Dylans devouring mind has been compared to blotting paper because he soaked up everything around him. File photograph
Princeton professor Sean Wilentz who has written on Dylan with scholarly insight, was right to suggest that his writing never lost its political reference, it has become much more direct over time, his vision is much more poetic, much more personal.