Book Review: Bob Dylan

It's not easy to write about Bob Dylan if you love him. The minute you put pen to paper you've stumbled on to his firing range. You're Mr Jones in Ballad of a Thin Man, who knows "something is happening here" but doesn't "know what it is"; you're "Ezra Pound and TS Eliot" pointlessly wrangling on Desolation Row; or you're one of the pestilent dons foolishly awarding him a degree in Day of the Locusts. You know nothing, you know too much, or you're some sort of blight on the nation.

Critiquing the critics should reduce you to an even lower level of parasite. Then again, ridiculing them like Bob would is not an option if, as in my case, you chickened out of contributing to this book in the first place.

Is Bob Dylan a great poet? No, he isn't. His poetry is slack, his "poetic" prose unreadable, and the poets he cites as influences (Blake, Poe, Rimbaud, Ginsberg) are, no matter how splendid or memorable their creations, some of the worst teachers one can have, guiding numberless young sparks down the road of excess to the palace of useless self-indulgence.

Bob Dylan is not actually a poet at all. He's a great songwriter, the best of the past 40 years, with at least as substantial a body of work as any poet of the period.

Songwriters string words over music, poets shore them against silence. These arts are as different as dancing and sculpture, though an air of loftiness and mystery has always veiled the word "poet", as against the flavour of commerce and populism attendant on "songwriter". Yet, just as great poetry makes songwriting look like the candy it generally is, this one great songwriter makes contemporary poetry look, on the whole, too personal and provisional, too smug in its politics, too indifferent to the world.

And it's no surprise that joining the ranks of Dylanologists nudges one into the searchlight of his scorn. There are not many ways of behaving on Earth that don't. Of tyrants and vagabonds, presidents and postal clerks, girlfriends and gangsters; on deserts, in cities, down streets, by rivers; as ballads, broadsides, lilts, lullabies, rock and pop and blues and country, Dylan's thousand-odd songs surge in and out of memory.

The range of form, subject, style and tone is breathtaking. No one in 20th-century song comes close; of 20th-century poets, perhaps only Auden is richer. To cling to one image of Dylan - whether in admiration or hostility - is to be mocked by others. The folkies are left booing in 1965 as he "goes electric"; the hippies lose the plot as he turns to country in 1970; fans of the swirling narratives of Blood on the Tracks turn pale at the Biblical rant of Saved!, while believers cross themselves at the bleak, flinching mortality of 1998's Time Out of Mind.

Dylan's journey, incorporating the hunger of teenage, the dazzle of youth, romantic disillusion, a couple of mid-life crises, restless spiritual roaming, a few cringing embarrassments, and the wry, drained clarity of his autumnal years, less resembles a rock career than the Seven Ages of Man.

In the face of this cornucopia, the "Poets and Professors" acquit themselves well. The professors narrow their gaze to a theme - names, trains, death, whatever - and connect dots like astronomers. The poets have a surer grasp of what not to do, which is to treat lyrics like poems. Simon Armitage, testing that approach, finds Tangled Up in Blue "something of a mess", but knows a great song when he hears it.

Lavinia Greenlaw, concentrating not on what's sung but how, looks at the way vowels in Dylan relate to emotions. She thinks she "might be stretching it" but she's truly on to something. Mark Ford sits back and illuminates his subject by the light of another great American traveller, Walt Whitman, finding lines from Song of Myself that could easily serve as foreword or epitaph to the labours of the man from Minnesota:

"You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,/But I shall be good health to you nevertheless."

Good health he was, long may he be so.

Glyn Maxwell's latest collection of poems, The Nerve is published by Picador (£7.99).