Christopher Bray
Folk Hero
At last a study of Bob Dylan’s work that isn’t premised on his being a major-league poet. Ever since the publication of Michael Gray’s Leavisite panegyric Song and Dance Man (1972), literary Dylan fans have been keen to counsel us that their man is the new Keats or Eliot. Ezra Pound said that if modernism were to have a future there’d have to be a merger of poetry and song, but even if you believe – as Allen Ginsberg did – that Dylan was the man who pulled off the deal, you’d have to concede that he’s a rocker at least as much as he is a writer. If Professor Aidan Day gets his kicks ‘Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan’ (the subtitle of his 1988 book Jokerman) then good luck to him. The majority of us prefer to hear them sung to the twang of a guitar.
Sean Wilentz, a professor at Princeton and historian in residence at www.bobdylan.com, is one of that majority. Though Bob Dylan in America is marred by the odd passage of over-enthusiastic exegesis, the book largely takes it for granted that its subject is such a plain-talking writer that his
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘He has become a kind of global guru, public intellectual and consultant to the great. He is the ultimate geopolitical gerontocrat.’
From July 2022: Piers Brendon on Henry Kissinger.
Piers Brendon - Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her
Piers Brendon: Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her - Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger
literaryreview.co.uk
‘Even setting to one side the historically neuralgic relationship with ... Ireland, Britain’s insular periphery has from at least the time of the Romans presented difficulties for authorities wishing to centralise.’
Peter Marshall on Britain's islands.
Peter Marshall - Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago
Peter Marshall: Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago - The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia
literaryreview.co.uk
Offer ends soon! Take advantage of our best ever Black Friday offer and get a year's subscription for £29.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/blackfriday/