A closer look …

… Tangled Up in Blue Poetics: Timothy Hampton Reads a Bob Dylan for the Ages - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

For a disruptive cultural-political hero and pop icon, Dylan has been understandably decoded by social contexts, auras of American history, as well as anti-conservative polemics. Not to mention his audience’s shifting admiration and animadversion across six decades, which has followed him from (say) triumph to decline to relentless return, as if he were some perpetual Lazarus of vision. It is perhaps this volatility that makes the close reading of specific texts still necessary, if not exceedingly difficult. Timothy Hampton’s detailed-laden study of text and form in Bob Dylan’s Poetics is a resource of literary-musical interpretation to start from and return to — and will likely prove to be indispensable.