Ricks, Christopher
Dylan's Vision of Sin
$15.95

As soon as critics began to take rock music seriously, critics began calling Bob Dylan a poet, and critics started taking rock music seriously at about the same moment that critics first heard Bob Dylan. Problem is or was it always seemed like kind of a bad joke. Dylan was just a rock n roll guy, right? He was a guitar slinger, a streetwise songster with the voice from hell that could take you to heaven. Not so fast. Christopher Ricks is one of our most learned men of letters, a true critic of the stature of Kermode or Kenner or Harold Bloom, an impeccable scholar. In this 500-page masterwork Ricks brings to the works and words of Dylan all the gravity he has previously employed to bring light upon such masters as Keats, Beckett, Tennyson, Eliot and Milton. In so doing, he puts an end to the argument about whether or not Dylan is a poet and simultaneously brings Dylan closer to being a poet of the status of Keats etc. How can there be any doubt?