When Bob Dylan was given the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, the Swedish Academy praised him for 'having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'. As a Dylan fan for over 30 years, I can wholeheartedly agree with this assessment. But I would take it further. For me, his true genius lies in his use of “intertextuality” (a literary term for borrowing elements from other creative works and making them resonate with meanings that they might not have had in their original context.)
To many Dylan fans, what I have just said might seem to diminish him as a genius. For me, the opposite is the case. This aspect of Dylan is paramount to understanding how the organisation of his songs’ texts creates such wide-ranging meanings seemingly effortlessly. Put another way, his use of sampling, recontextualising and stitching together disparate fragments of human culture is exactly what makes his work uniquely resonant. Dylan's originality, in other words, partly comes from his ability to be “unoriginal”.
Dylan did not invent the technique of borrowing lines for intertextual purposes. He inherited it from the traditional folk, blues and ballad traditions of the early 20th century. In those genres, song lyrics were not necessarily set in stone but were more fluid. Singers habitually borrowed a verse from, say, a 19th-century ballad and another from a Mississippi Delta blues song, placing them both within another song. A song was less a fixed object than part of a constantly evolving tradition.
So what Dylan did was not particularly remarkable within the folk tradition. But he took this folk ethos and elevated it into a modern fine art. One could argue that this approach had already been developed in literature, most notably by T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land, for example, is constructed from fragments of different literary, religious and cultural traditions. Eliot takes material from Shakespeare, Dante, the Bible, popular songs and classical literature and places it into a new context. But I would argue that Dylan took to this approach more naturally than Eliot. Eliot made the collage visible. Dylan made it invisible yet more effective.
That distinction is important. Eliot often wants us to notice the collision between the different sources. Dylan frequently conceals the seams. A listener can hear a Dylan song and experience it as a unified piece of writing without necessarily realising that parts of it may have originated decades, centuries or even thousands of years earlier.
Here are just three examples of Dylan’s intertextual approach.
In his 2001 album Love and Theft, he borrowed several lines from Confessions of a Yakuza, a 1989 book by Junichi Saga. When Saga heard about this, he was apparently flattered. In his 2006 album Modern Times, Dylan borrowed fragments from the Roman poet Ovid and the Civil War poet Henry Timrod. And in his 1985 song 'Tight Connection to My Heart', he borrowed a line from a 1967 episode of Star Trek spoken by Captain Kirk.
The important point is that Dylan isn't simply taking phrases because he likes the way they sound. His genius is not merely in finding a phrase, but in knowing where to place it. That is where borrowing becomes transformation.
In its original context, a line or phrase serves a particular, often functional purpose. But when Dylan takes that line and places it somewhere completely different, its meaning changes because its surroundings have changed. ‘I’ll go along with the charade’, for example, is a line from Star Trek. In that context it is simply dialogue spoken by Captain Kirk. But when Dylan places it into a song about emotional exhaustion and failed relationships, the phrase suddenly becomes a poignant reflection on human deception and the performance of a relationship that has already begun to collapse.
This is why I think it is useful to think of Dylan as an editor of human experience. An editor doesn't necessarily create all the raw material. The genius lies in selection, arrangement and juxtaposition: knowing which fragments belong together and understanding what happens when they are placed alongside one another.
The same principle applies on a much larger scale. Dylan has absorbed biblical language, blues idioms, folk ballads, Beat poetry, noir fiction, cinema, Shakespeare, old songs and the American vernacular.
When a Dylan song contains fragments of old folk songs, biblical verse, noir films and classic literature, it gathers an innate sense of historical weight. Even if a listener does not identify the exact origin of a line, the song can still feel oddly familiar. There is a sense that they have heard something like this before, even if they cannot quite say where. Dylan therefore creates a concentrated web of shared human memory.
The song feels timeless not because it was written in a vacuum, but because it is constructed from the very building blocks of the culture around it. He takes language that already carries cultural associations and gives those associations a purpose.
Dylan's genius isn't merely that he creates language from nothing. It is that he knows which pieces of language already exist, understands the cultural weight they carry and knows exactly where to put them. He is, in that sense, not simply a songwriter. He is a curator of human language and memory.
That, to me, is why Bob Dylan is a genius.
