Richard F. Thomas, a professor of the Classics at Harvard University and a big Bob Dylan fan, has written a book called Why Bob Dylan Matters (2017).

Why Bob Dylan Matters is an interesting title, one that presupposes that Dylan does matter. Certainly he matters to this author; and in some 300 easy to read pages, you can get a pretty good idea why that is so. I enjoyed learning from Mr. Thomas, but would like to focus here on what I hope is constructive criticism.

The first point is pretty straightforward. Throughout these pages are many quotations from Dylan’s work and the works of others. The quotes are helpful and important – but they are not always accurate. For example (and there are other instances), very early in the book, Thomas quotes “Blowin’ in the Wind” in its entirety. In the version he gives us, the first verse includes the question, “Yes, ‘n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly/Before they’re ever banned?” – rather than “forever banned.” Not a big deal, but it changes the meter and I found it distracting. And, nearly at the end of the book, a quote from “Maggie’s Farm” is presented as, “Well, I try my best/To be just who I am”; whereas, I have always heard that line to say “To be just like I am.” Again, it may not be a big deal, but it takes away the parallel construction of the next two lines, which are, “But everybody wants you/To be just like them.” “Like I am” is set off against “just like them,” making a more powerful presentation.

Another thing I did not like is that Mr. Thomas spends the majority of the book discussing Dylan’s recognized and admitted plagiarism, and presenting excuses for it – even telling us that it should be referred to as “intertextuality.”

Elsewhere on this site is a brief comment on intertextuality(without using that term) in the song “With God on Our Side,” discussing how the work of another served as a springboard to Dylan’s more universal look at a similar situation. Mr. Thomas provides many examples and tables showing obvious similarities between lines and phrases from Dylan’s songs and earlier works by the likes of Homer, Ovid, Mark Twain, minor 19^th Century Confederate poet Henry Timrod and others; but in most cases he does not consider how, or whether, those words are used as a similar springboard for new ideas and concepts or are simply stolen from the earlier authors.

Of course, other songwriters have incorporated some of Bob Dylan’s lyrics into their songs, and Dylan has responded with lawsuits – such as the one pursued against Hootie and the Blowfish for the lyrics of “Only Wanna Be With You” infringing on his copyright (“Put on a little Dylan sitting on a fence/You say that line is great, you ask me what I meant by/ ‘Said I shot a man named Gray, took his wife to Italy/She inherited a million bucks/ And when she died it came to me’ …”).  Not to worry, though; I am sure that he and his managers understand karma.

Clearly, Thomas does not succeed with all of the excuses he presents. However, the fact that some parts of his songs have been borrowed/stolen from others may not really matter in understanding “Why Bob Dylan Matters.”

Let me take a quote from another of Dylan’s songs, “Lay, Lady, Lay,” to explain why he may matter. He says, “Whatever colors you have in your mind/I’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine.” Bob Dylan has a way with words and music and performance that can awaken thoughts, feelings and beliefs, memories and emotions in a listener. His works can make you more acutely aware of who you are – or can help you remember where you came from. Right now, thinking about “Lay, Lady, Lay,” I can feel what it was like to walk down a residential street in Boulder, Colorado, on a warm night in the Spring of 1969, hearing the music of “Nashville Skyline” playing from almost every open door or window. That adds pleasant color to just one of many memories.

Richard Thomas is a classicist, and the colors in his mind are painted from the classics. For him, Bob Dylan matters because he sees Dylan’s works as part of a stream (to use his metaphor) that flows from Homer to Ovid and Virgil to Shakespeare to Eliot and Pound, and which is made fresh and modern and relevant to the present time through Dylan’s artistry.

The colors in your mind are going to be different from mine or Richard Thomas’s. That doesn’t matter.  It is interesting and enjoyable to observe how Richard Thomas’s colors come alive and shine for him.

And, If you happen to believe that Dylan does not matter, that doesn’t matter, either. You will probably not want to read this book; though if you did, your mind might well light up from Thomas’s discussions of other poets and novelists and their works.

This book is not perfect, but it is interesting. It sets forth interesting ideas about things such as how Dylan’s membership in his high school Latin Club may have influenced his later study of the classics; or how some of the movies he may have seen may have led him to study the Roman Empire. It provides quotations from various interviews that appear to advance Thomas’s thesis. And it gives some perspective on why this rock star singer/songwriter was deemed worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Still, Bob Dylan remains an enigma whose works are best enjoyed for simply what they are, augmented by the colors within each of us.