In a new review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rob Wilson discusses Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work by Timothy Hampton. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“Hampton has turned Dylan not just into an American poet but a world poet, some of whose works will outlast the ages, fashions, accusations, and prizes. He gives back to Dylan’s works, as Deleuze advised the critic must, some of the joy, spirituality, and the politics that went into their creation. We can remain grateful for such a timely, inventive, well-scaled work like Bob Dylan’s Poetics as a vade mecum to read along with the ever-renewing world of poetic and musical creation that is Bob Dylan. Dylan once admitted to his earliest biographer-critic, Robert Shelton, in the restless London summer of 1978, ‘I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.’ By now we begin to realize that Dylan’s poetry, as Timothy Hampton’s fine study yet again shows, might just live on and on across the ages.”