dumbfoundry

CHRISTOPHER RICKS and I share a privilege. It's one you share too, assuming you join in our almost fathomless esteem for the songs and performances of the sui generis poet-singer Bob Dylan. That is, to have had our lifetimes overlap with an artist whom stone Dylan fans like Ricks and I suspect future generations will regard, in his visionary fecundity, with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso and the like. [...]

That Christopher Ricks? Yes, that one -- the great British literary critic, newly elected Oxford Professor of Poetry, to succeed Paul Muldoon in September. Ricks is an exemplar of the diminishingly seen art of ''close reading,'' an explicator of Milton, Keats, Tennyson and Eliot, praised by none other than W. H. Auden as ''the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding,'' and now the author of ''Dylan's Visions of Sin'' -- a volume perhaps ipso facto to be regarded as either the most intimidating rock-critical treatise ever published, or the silliest, or both. Or, as one friend blurted when I'd said I was reviewing the book: ''Does that mean you have to read all the way to the end?''

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