In case you wondered …

… Why Dylan Matters by Richard F Thomas review – Virgil, Homer, Ovid… Dylan? | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 Academics have picked over Dylan’s songs in the past, most notably the Cambridge don Christopher Ricks, who made heavy work of the myriad allusions therein in his grandly titled Dylan’s Visions of Sin. In the wake of the Nobel prize in literature controversy, Thomas’s timely book goes further by attempting, though not always convincingly, to recast Dylan as an heir to Virgil and Homer. “He is part of that classical stream,” asserts Thomas, “whose spring starts out in Greece and Rome and flows on down though the years...”