Dylan's Visions of Sin

Dylan's Visions of Sin

Bob Dylan's ways with words are a wonder, matched as they are with his music and verified by those voices of his. In response to the whole range of Dylan early and late (his songs of social conscience, of earthly love, of divine love, and of contemplation), this critical appreciation listens to Dylan's attentive genius, alive in the very words and their rewards. "Fools they made a mock of sin." Dylan's is an art in which sins are laid bare (and resisted), virtues are valued (and manifested), and the graces brought home. The seven deadly sins, the four cardinal virtues (harder to remember?), and the three heavenly graces: these make up everybody's world -- but Dylan's in particular. Or rather, his worlds, since human dealings of every kind are his for the artistic seizing. Pride is anatomized in "Like a Rolling Stone," Envy in "Positively 4th Street," Anger in "Only a Pawn in Their Game" ... But, hearteningly, Justice reclaims "Hattie Carroll," Fortitude "Blowin' in the Wind," Faith "Precious Angel," Hope "Forever Young," and Charity "Watered-Down Love." In The "New Yorker, Alex Ross wrote that "Ricks's writing on Dylan is the best there is. Unlike most rock critics -- 'forty-year-olds talking to ten-year-olds, ' Dylan has called them -- he writes for adults." In the "Times (London), Bryan Appleyard maintained that "Ricks, one of the most distinguished literary critics of our time, is almost the only writer to have applied serious literary intelligence to Dylan ..." Dylan's countless listeners (and even the artist himself, who knows?) may agree with W.H. Auden that Ricks "is exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding." “Admirers of Dylan know that his lyrics have a special, concentrated power…. Ricks’s achievement is that he explains, word by word, where that power comes from and how it works.” - Rolling Stone “Ricks, for his part, has seen in Dylan what he is superbly equipped to see, that Dylan’s art is in dialogue with the English language at its heights, that it is about language.” - New York Newsday Christopher Ricks is a Warren Professor of the Humanities, codirector of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and a member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He was formerly professor of English at the universities of Bristol and Cambridge. Ricks is the author of Milton's Grand Style (1963), Tennyson (second edition, 1989), Keats and Embarrassment (1974), The Force of Poetry (1984), T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988), Beckett's Dying Words (1993), Essays in Appreciation (1996), Allusion to the Poets (2002), and Reviewery (2003). He is also the editor of Poems of Tennyson (second edition, 1987), The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987), A.E. Housman: Collected Poems and Selected Prose (1988), Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 by T.S. Eliot (1996), The Oxford Book of English Verse (1999), Selected Poems of James Henry (2002), and Decisions and Revisions in T.S. Eliot (2003). Dylan's Visions of Sin By Christopher Ricks Ecco Copyright © 2005 Christopher Ricks All right reserved. ISBN: 0060599243 Songs, Poems, Rhymes Songs, Poems Dylan has always had a way with words. He does not simply have his way with them, since a true comprehender of words is no more their master, than he or she is their servant. The triangle of Dylan's music, his voice and his unpropitiatory words: this is still his equilateral thinking. One day a critic may do justice not just to all three of these independent powers, but to their interdependence in Dylan's art. The interdependence doesn't have to be a competition, it is a culmination -- the word chosen by Allen Ginsberg, who could bean awe-inspiring poet and was an endearing awful music-maker, for whom Dylan's songs were "the culmination of Poetry-music as dreamt of in the '50s & early 60s". Dylan himself has answered when asked: Why are you doing what you're doing? [Pause] "Because I don't know anything else to do. I'm good at it." How would you describe "it"? "I'm an an artist. I try to create art." What follows this clarity, or follows from it, has been differently put by him over the forty years, finding itself crediting the words and the music variously at various times. The point of juxtaposing his utterances isn't to catch him out, it is to see him catching different emphases in all this, undulating and diverse. WORDS RULE, OKAY? "I consider myself a poet first and a musician second." "It ain't the melodies that're important man, it's the words." MUSIC RULES, OKAY? "Anyway it's the song itself that matters, not the sound of the song. I only look at them musically. I only look at them as things to sing. It's the music that the words are sung to that's important. I write the songs because I need something to sing. It's the difference between the words on paper and the song. The song disappears into the air, the paper stays." NEITHER ACOUSTIC NOR ELECTRIC RULES, OKAY? Do