Mary Freeman

Bob Dylan's Command of Metaphor and other essays Mary Freeman

Written at the height of Bob Dylan's popularity, this book's essays link his metaphors to the poetry of Shakespeare, Blake, Donne, and T. S. Eliot. Literary critics as diverse as Aristotle, Coleridge, Philip Wheelwright, and Northrup Frye concur that the command of metaphor may be the most important gift for a poet to possess. In this book their theories are brought to bear on Dylan's lyrics in close studies, answering the question "Why was Bob Dylan awarded the Nobel prize for *literature* in 2016?" In addition, one essay (entitled "Chapter Three"), explores the Sixties, the reasons for the cultural revolution that happened then, and how the metaphors in the lyrics of Bob Dylan, a major voice in the day, relate to it.