The Poetry of Bob Dylan

Thirty Essays on Thirty Songs

Mike Chasar

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9798765124208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry

Through short essays, leading poetry critics and Bob Dylan experts analyze songs from a range of perspectives to illuminate the songs' poetic and literary character.

An innovative resource for Bob Dylan fans and scholars alike, these thirty essays by leading scholars of poetry, music, and literature illustrate how and why the work of the 2016 Nobel Literature Laureate is in fact so literary. Examining how Dylan's lyrics shape or get shaped by vocalization, performance, instrumentation, film, recording technologies, and the forces of history unfolding around him, this collection models a range of ways to understand the songs as poetical phenomena by answering questions like: How can we read and understand Dylan's lyrics as poetry? How do those lyrics build on, dialogue with, and expand the poetic tradition? How does Dylan's style change over time while both pushing and responding to changes in the world of popular music? Collecting archival research, close reading, musical analysis, and various modes of cultural criticism under one cover, The Poetry of Bob Dylan: Thirty Essays on Thirty Songs stakes a claim to Dylan's central place in the history of American poetry.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The Poetry of Bob Dylan Mike Chasar
• 1 “Talkin’ New York” (1962) Lesley Wheeler
• 2 “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1963) Peter Miller
• 3 “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (1964) Joanna Davis-McElligatt
• 4 “My Back Pages” (1964) Matthew Kilbane
• 5 “It Ain’t Me, Babe” (1964) Marsha Bryant
• 6 “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (1965) Angela Sorby
• 7 “She Belongs to Me” (1965) Jeremy Yudkin
• 8 “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965) Linda Kinnahan
• 9 “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (1965) Urayoán Noel
• 10 “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” (1966) Loren Glass
• 11 “Visions of Johanna” (1966) Melissa Girard
• 12 “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” (1966) Chip Tucker
• 13 “Lay, Lady, Lay” (1969) Virginia Jackson
• 14 “Sign on the Window” (1970) Steven Rings
• 15 “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” (1971) Stephanie Burt
• 16 “Tangled Up in Blue” (1975) Anne Margaret Daniel
• 17 “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” (1975) Bartholomew Brinkman
• 18 “Hurricane” (1975) William J. Maxwell
• 19 “Joey” (1976) Sean Latham
• 20 “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” (1979) Ryan Topper
• 21 “Jokerman” (1983) Michael Thurston
• 22 “I and I” (1983) David Caplan
• 23 “Brownsville Girl” (1986) Ryan Hibbett
• 24 “Man in the Long Black Coat” (1989) Taylor Black
• 25 “Stack a Lee” (1993) Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega
• 26 “Not Dark Yet” (1997) Aldon Lynn Nielsen
• 27 “Highlands” (1997) Marit J. MacArthur
• 28 “Tin Angel” (2012) Richard F. Thomas
• 29 “My Own Version of You” (2020) Adam Bradley
• 30 “Murder Most Foul” (2020) Thomas G. Palaima
• Bonus Track: “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (1973) Mike Chasar
• Notes
• Index