Here are Bob Dylan's own thoughts on Like a Rolling Stone, the song many people believe to be his best: "It was 10 pages long.
It wasn't called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper - all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest.
In the end it wasn't hatred. Revenge, that's a better word. It was telling someone they didn't know what it's all about, and they were lucky. "I had never thought of it as a song, until one day I was at the piano, and on the paper it was singing 'How does it feel?' in a slow motion pace, in the utmost of slow motion. It was like swimming in lava. Hanging by their arms from a birch tree. Skipping, kicking the tree, hitting a nail with your foot. Seeing someone in the pain they were bound to meet up with. I wrote it. It didn't fail. It was straight."
In this often satisfying, sometimes frustrating book of essays by poets and academics, Neil Corcoran has assembled 14 essays and one poem on various aspects of Dylan's work. In his introduction, Corcoran credits Dylan with "clarity, force, resonance, grace, relevance in a wide number of contexts, and utter memorability", a judgment with which most Dylan fans will concur. However, it is made only in the context of Dylan's lyrics, and highlights the difficulty with a number of these pieces - the music gets left out.
This is not always so: Simon Armitage, after a long smart-aleck disquisition on Tangled up in Blue, finally admits "Tangled up in Blue is a great song. But peering into it like this tells us that it's something of a mess, or that literary criticism is the wrong tool when it comes to the analysis of song lyrics". Yes, indeed. Pamela Thurschell, in a terrific essay on Dylan and women, quotes Jon Landau: ". . . . in Don't Think Twice, the beauty of Dylan's vocal-guitar-harmonica performance doesn't really say what the words do, and, in fact, really transforms the verbal meaning of the song into something much deeper and much less coarse". Lavinia Greenlaw, in an enchanting piece on Nashville Skyline, makes a case for delay as the characteristic mode of the album, and looks closely at Dylan's phrasing in Lay Lady Lay, I Threw it all Away, and Tonight I'll be staying Here with You. Her argument is entirely convincing, and the essay a model of affectionate memory and perception combined with a sharp ear for the songs.
There are essays on Dylan and religion, Dylan and landscape, Dylan and time, names in Dylan's songs, Dylan's alleged depression, Dylan's end rhymes, Dylan and death, Dylan and humour. (This last, by Susan Wheeler, has a lovely image of the writer as a teenager vacuuming her mother's house "in a state of empowered rage", listening to Maggie's Farm: "It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor".) All of them are instructive in various ways, some afflicted with the virus of impenetrable academic jargon, some full of insight and clarity.
There are various over-elaborate, if interesting, explorations of the songs: for example, Patrick Crotty has a paragraph on Boots of Spanish Leather where he explores the boots' symbolic meaning - travel, sexual fetishism, longing for what cannot be had. It's possible, even probable, that Dylan just liked them and wanted them.
Paul Muldoon has a little gem of a poem about Dylan's visit to Princeton in 1970 to accept an honorary degree. Strangely, the academic best known for writing about Dylan, Christopher Ricks, is not included in this collection, and one misses his lyrically engaged prose and his obvious devotion to Dylan.
The women writers in this book seem to like Dylan more than the men do, and to connect him with the soundtrack of their own lives. This is interesting, since Dylan has often been accused of misogyny. Patricia Thurschwell asks "what does it mean to consider oneself simultaneously a feminist and a fan of some wrenchingly misogynist music? Wrenching, because smart, not wrenching because dumb?" She then disposes honestly of Just like a Woman, makes a case for Dylan as misanthrope rather than misogynist, and admits that Positively 4th Street, his most misanthropic song, still thrills her.
Songs are not poems; their power depends on the interaction between words, music, arrangement and performance. The different versions of, say, Tangled Up in Blue presented and performed by Dylan since its first appearance on Blood on the Tracks demonstrate how important the non-verbal elements of a song are. Nonetheless, there is a specific pleasure to be got from analysing the amazing and abundant lyrics produced by Dylan over the years, and "Do you, Mr. Jones?" substantially provides it.
Catriona Crowe is a senior archivist in the National Archives of Ireland
"Do you, Mr. Jones?": Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors. Edited by Neil Corcoran. Chatto and Windus, 378 pp. £17.99