Grey Gowrie

Zimmerman bound or unbound?

What is going on here? What on earth is going on here? Christopher Ricks, the world’s leading critic of poetry in English, Frank Kermode and the American Helen Vendler his only rivals, has devoted, has lavished 500 pages of hard-core, hardback, exegetical analysis to the words which propel Bob Dylan’s songs. The issue is not proving a point about Dylan’s poetic talent. That could be achieved in an essay. Indeed Ricks has already written one, in the Listener, as long ago as 1972 when Ricks was 39 and Dylan 31. Now Ricks is 70 and Dylan in his early sixties and Ricks has decided to throw neither flowers nor tomatoes at Dylan from the stalls but a socking, concussing magnum opus. Dylan’s Vision of Sin reads less like a book about Dylan than a book about Ricks: one which transposes Keats’s tag about the ‘negative capability’ of the artist to the life and work of the critic.

I do not mean to argue that this is a self-centred book. On the contrary, Ricks has immersed himself in Dylan’s words, including their sung variations, until his own nature takes on Dylan colouring, like the dyer’s hand. If, like me, you revere both Ricks and Dylan, you will enjoy it in an enjoyably infuriated way. If Dylan is your main thing, you are likely to miss the point. So the guy writes good songs. So play them.

It is important, though, to take in the unprecedented scale and nature of what Ricks has done. It is lazy to think of critics as inferior or manqué artists, camp following wannabes merely. Anyone can think of 20 good, even great poets. There are very few great critics. Most, in poetry, are practitioners: Eliot; Auden; Lawrence; Jarrell; Christopher Ricks’s own mentor, William Empson.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in