Bob Dylan's Poetics: How the Songs Work

by Timothy Hampton

A career-spanning account of the artistry and politics of Bob Dylan’s songwritingBob Dylan’s reception of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has elevated him beyond the world of popular music, establishing him as a major modern artist. However, until now, no study of his career has focused on the details and nuances of the songs, showing how they work as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion. Bob Dylan’s How the Songs Work is the first comprehensive book on both the poetics and politics of Dylan’s compositions. It studies Dylan, not as a pop hero, but as an artist, as a maker of songs. Focusing on the interplay of music and lyric, it traces Dylan’s innovative use of musical form, his complex manipulation of poetic diction, and his dialogues with other artists, from Woody Guthrie to Arthur Rimbaud. Moving from Dylan’s earliest experiments with the blues, through his mastery of rock and country, up to his densely allusive recent recordings, Timothy Hampton offers a detailed account of Dylan’s achievement. Locating Dylan in the long history of artistic modernism, the book studies the relationship between form, genre, and the political and social themes that crisscross Dylan’s work. Bob Dylan’s How the Songs Work offers both a nuanced engagement with the work of a major artist and a meditation on the contribution of song at times of political and social change.

Genres: Music, Poetry, Nonfiction

288 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 4, 2019

Reviews

[Barry Hammond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although Bob Dylan's winning of the Nobel Prize In Literature was controversial, Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley, Timothy Hampton's study of Bob Dylan's Poetics may just change your mind. Hampton takes an in-depth look at Dylan's songs over the entire span of his lengthy career, dividing his work into several periods, where the structures changed and evolved, reflecting his concerns at each time. Hampton is unique in that he has no interest in Dylan's "biography," the approach that combs through interviews, writings, and the obtainable facts of the subject's life to find out "what he really thinks." He looks only at the songs themselves, their structures, subjects, themes, the language used, how they are put together and (unlike many who study only the lyrics) he looks at how the lyrics interact with the musical structures Dylan uses and also how the voice and performance interact with the music and lyrics.

This structural approach yields a great deal of insight. Hampton sees a lot and puts it down with precision and clarity. Not only does he study such things as rhyme schemes, stanza lengths, and poetic structures but he looks at the musical structures that surround and support them and how the voice and instruments interact with those structures. He also deals very intensely with the history of those structures, where they came from and how and why Dylan uses them at each instance in context of the song. You see clearly that the writer we call "Bob Dylan" doesn't do anything by accident. There are rigorous structures underlying his work that make historical reference and usage of a wide variety of classical writing from Petrarch to Arthur Rimbaud, Bertolt Brecht to F. Scott Fitzgerald, St. Augustine to Joseph Conrad, Jack Kerouac to Dante Alighieri, T.S. Eliot to Virgil, Pablo Neruda to Allen Ginsberg, William Faulkner to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Paul Verlaine to Walt Whitman and many others. There is also a wide variety of musical structure and reference from standard folk music and Woody Guthrie, to the blues, gospel, hymns, George Gershwin, tin pan alley, country music, Cole Porter, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, The Beatles, Beethoven, not to mention Hollywood film and all manner of mythology and popular culture.

What is revealed is that this is not just some critic layering Dylan's work with his own interests and obsessions but that the work itself consistently and deliberately contains these historical references and uses them to specific effect for clear reasons. It's an eye-opening work of critical brilliance. BH.

[Book Grocer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Purchase Bob Dylan's Poetics here for just $25!

Timothy Hampton devotes extensive time to Bob Dylan's lyrics in this in-depth and erudite dissection of the man's songs. By placing them in a historical context, you will learn so much and maybe find a new appeciation for Dylan's music.

Elisa - The Book Grocer

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best works of scholarly analysis of Bob songs. You don't think you need another tome on the guy, and then Hampton comes along with this genuinely exciting and elucidating study. Highly recommended!