Bob Dylan's Poetics by Timothy Hampton

How the Songs Work

A close-reading study that treats Dylan’s songs as crafted poems, tracing how his lyrics use voice, music, repetition, irony, collage and shifts of register to produce meaning; through detailed analyses of recordings, drafts and performances the book shows how melodic setting, vocal delivery and revision shape the poems’ effects, situating his work within modernist and vernacular traditions and arguing that his distinctive poetics—mixing literary allusion, everyday speech and fragmented narratives—reconfigured what popular song could do as a form of poetic expression.

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