In 2016 Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition' This collection of essays by leading poets & critics
- with a new foreword by Will Self
- examines Dylan's poetic genius as well as his astounding cultural influence over the decades From Orpheus to Faiz song & poetry have been closely linked Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition' Salman Rushdie The most significant Western popular artist in any form or medium of the past sixty years' Will Self For fifty & some years he has bent coaxed teased & persuaded words into lyric & narrative shapes that are at once extraordinary & inevitable' Andrew Motion His haunting music & lyrics have always seemed in the deepest sense literary' Joyce Carol Oates There is something inevitable about Bob Dylan A storyteller pulling out all the stops
- metaphor allegory repetition precise detail His virtue is in his style his attitude his disposition to the world' Simon Armitage