Dylan’s Visions of Sin
Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities, and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University, having formerly been professor of English at the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge. He is a member of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, of which he was president from 2007 to 2008.
‘Structured around the concepts of sin, virtue and grace, Ricks’s close reading and imaginative cross-referencing will indeed uncover meanings in Dylan’s songs that would never have occurred to you.’
Anthony Quinn, Daily Telegraph
‘Zips along with irrepressible good humour . . . Ricks’s work has the lustre of a lifetime of engagement with greatness.’
Peter Aspden, Financial Times
‘Fascinating, there are wonderfully penetrating and illuminating moments to be found. I was never less than stimulated and frequently stirred.’
John Preston, Sunday Telegraph
‘Ricks is an exemplar of the diminishingly seen art of “close reading”, an explicator of Milton, Keats, Tennyson and Eliot . . . Such clockwork analysis never seems to drain Dylan’s work of its vitality, but rather to renew a listener’s amazement . . . In doing so he’s found the songs all the more extraordinary, not wanting in any measure . . . Ricks’s book leads you back into Dylan’s music, no small virtue.’
Jonathan Lethem, New York Times Book Review
‘Compelling, convincing, and challenging work of literary scholarship.’
Alan Taylor, Sunday Herald
Also by Christopher Ricks
Milton’s Grand Style
Tennyson
Keats and Embarrassment
The Force of Poetry
T.S. Eliot and Prejudice
Beckett’s Dying Words
Essays in Appreciation
Allusion to the Poets
Reviewery
Decisions and Revisions in T.S. Eliot
True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell under the sign of Eliot and Pound
Editor
The Poems of Tennyson
The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse
Tennyson: a Selected Edition
Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1900–1917 by T.S. Eliot
The Oxford Book of English Verse
Selected Poems of James Henry
Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American, Oxford 2004–2009
New and Selected Poems by Samuel Menashe
The Expelled / The Calmative / The End / First Love by Samuel Beckett
Tennyson: Selected Poems
What Maisie Knew by Henry James
Table Talk & Recollections by Samuel Rogers
DYLAN’S VISIONS OF SIN
Christopher Ricks
This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2011
1
Copyright © Christopher Ricks 2003
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Viking, 80 Strand, London, WC2R ORL, England
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 201 3
eISBN 978 0 87586 202 0
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire
Contents
Sins, Virtues, Heavenly Graces
The Sins
The Virtues
The Heavenly Graces
