Do You Mr Jones?

Book excerpt: In 2016, Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. This collection of essays by leading poets and critics – with a new foreword by Will Self – examines Dylan’s poetic genius, as well as his astounding cultural influence over the decades. ‘From Orpheus to Faiz, song and poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition’ Salman Rushdie ‘The most significant Western popular artist in any form or medium of the past sixty years’ Will Self ‘For fifty and some years he has bent, coaxed, teased and persuaded words into lyric and narrative shapes that are at once extraordinary and inevitable’ Andrew Motion ‘His haunting music and lyrics have always seemed, in the deepest sense, literary’ Joyce Carol Oates ‘There is something inevitable about Bob Dylan... A storyteller pulling out all the stops – metaphor, allegory, repetition, precise detail... His virtue is in his style, his attitude, his disposition to the world’ Simon Armitage