Distinguished British literary critic and Boston University professor Christopher Ricks answers this in his spirited new book, "Dylan's Visions of Sin." He approaches Dylan's hat and finds it brimming, just as in the past he has found Keats, Milton, and Tennyson worthy of close reading.
Within this hefty tome, protest songs, love songs, and folk songs -- many so familiar that to think that they once didn't exist is dizzying -- become fresh and new in a flurry of puns, wordplay, and webs of allusions that stretch from the Bible to Clint Eastwood to "Pilgrim's Progress."
Ricks, an imaginative scholar, fights off ardent fans who might take the book as a challenge, an attempt to change firmly held opinions about the folk god. His mission is unrelated: Ricks includes almost no background about Dylan, and no history or context to the songs that he examines. Instead, he attempts to reveal the source of the songs' power by demonstrating how they work as poems.
Using his athletic style of literary criticism, Ricks riffs on Dylan's poetry and transforms an experience of the songs with the sheer force of his appreciation. "I think of what I am doing as prizing songs, not as [prizing] open minds," he writes playfully in the introduction.
He organizes his project around human experience, choosing to trace Dylan's work through the seven sins, the four cardinal virtues, and the three heavenly graces. The sheer scale of the book demonstrates the breadth of Dylan's work and supports Rick's argument that this scruffy folk singer belongs on a level with the most revered poets in the English language.
But most of the evidence comes from Ricks's play in Dylan's work. As Ricks mucks through the sins (never slothfully), it is as if he has taken away the face of the watch so that readers can see the gears inside. The songs are working, ticking, grinding together with complex coordination that seems effortless from afar.
