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His apocalyptic poetry plucks images and forms from the blues, the Bible, the Beats, Symbolists, William Blake, T.S. Eliot, and a balladeer tradition dating from medieval French and English minstrelsy to Appalachian settlement to Woody Guthrie, his first muse. His narrative voice shifts from work to work as he has fully embodied various American characters for over half a century—folk troubadour, rock and roll trickster, earnest country crooner, evangelist, weary bluesman, starry-eyed jazz singer. “There is no systematic way of analyzing Dylan’s song lyrics or poems,” writes Julia Callaway at the Oxford Dictionaries blog; “they span more than five decades of historical context and musical style.
