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It is important, though, to take in the unprecedented scale and nature of what Ricks has done. It is lazy to think of critics as inferior or manqué artists, camp following wannabes merely. Anyone can think of 20 good, even great poets. There are very few great critics. Most, in poetry, are practitioners: Eliot; Auden; Lawrence; Jarrell; Christopher Ricks’s own mentor, William Empson. Ricks’s book Keats and Embarrassment is one of the great moral illuminations of the last century. John Bayley’s The Characters of Love, unforgivably out of print, is just such another. You need books like these to see the point of reading other than a way to get through day or night. And if not a practitioner, Ricks is certainly a scholar. I doubt there is a better equipped one-volume edition of poems than his Tennyson. As Auden said, he ‘is exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding’. Ricks taking his trowel, his toolkit to Dylan is a literary event as consequent as if Alfred Brendel, say, brought out a new edition of Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts with a long comparison of Dylan to Schubert appended. Schubert and the Beatles have indeed been thrown together from time to time, but not (and this is the point) by Brendel.
Comparisons abound in these visions of sin. Ricks, in my view rightly, calls them correspondences. The book’s title derives from its superstructure. The songs reflect a template for life: the seven deadly sins, the cardinal virtues, the heavenly graces. Dylan’s music derives from country crossed with jazz. The King James bible, and what we would call the non-conformist or Methodist religious tradition, are important to both. Cadences, tropes, metaphors, usages are not infinite. The pleasure of poetry, the art of it, lies in a collision between familiar and new: what oft was expressed but ne’er so well, in both linguistic and conceptual terms, rearranged. Ricks poses no difficulty by taking Bob Dylan at his own value: ‘I consider myself a poet first and a musician second.’ So did Wagner. Dylan’s American English is far livelier than Wagner’s fake mediaeval German, the composer’s own poetic vision being another thing altogether. Mr Tambourine Man plays his song in the jingle-jangle morning until it deepens ‘to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free/Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands/With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves’. Writing like that is independent of the tune, which is one of Dylan’s best. The tune nonetheless comprehends it.
Robert Zimmerman took his name from Dylan Thomas (which infuriated John Berryman, a greater songsmith for poetry, a musical non-starter). He is certainly steeped in T. S. Eliot and Eliot, whose early work has been edited by Ricks, is the great poet of the jazz age as well as the sage of Little Gidding. Dylan knows Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson and Robert Graves. Ricks exhaustively and exhaustingly truffle-hunts correspondences with Donne, Blake, Browning, Swinburne and Kipling as well. This works to the degree that all songs in English borrow props from all other songs in English, whether you find yourself waltzing down the yellow brick road or slyly suggesting that your mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun. The genius of Shakespeare is that he rearranged the compendium of his linguistic culture, as well as its toys and dressing-up box. Dylan’s songs can be subtle scene-shifters in the same way. Christopher Ricks makes use of a telling quotation from William James about Shakespeare as a professional amuser, controlled by his audience’s needs. It is instructive to look at the poetry of entertainment, of audience manipulation. It is less instructive to do so by means of an old technique known as the New Criticism, through which poems are stripped down, then reassembled. In purely linguistic terms, Dylan’s songs do not, should not, arrest our eyes in the way they command our ears. We need the tunes and then some. We need the nasal, amusical, disharmonic and curious singing voice of the old troubadour himself.
Sam Peckinpah’s masterpiece Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, has Dylan playing an Ariel or Puck-like figure. He does not sing. Auden’s take on The Tempest opens with Prospero begging Ariel to stay with him while he packs for ‘briefly Milan, then earth’. Ricks is playing Prospero here to Dylan’s Ariel. It is an awesome, perverse achievement: an anti-memoir in the Malraux sense. It does not make for easy listening or reading. It did send me back to my discs.
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