In 2016, Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature `for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'. This collection of essays by leading poets and critics - with a new foreword by Will Self - examines Dylan's poetic genius, as well as his astounding cultural influence over the decades. `From Orpheus to Faiz, song and poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition' Salman Rushdie `The most significant Western popular artist in any form or medium of the past sixty years' Will Self `For fifty and some years he has bent, coaxed, teased and persuaded words into lyric and narrative shapes that are at once extraordinary and inevitable' Andrew Motion `His haunting music and lyrics have always seemed, in the deepest sense, literary' Joyce Carol Oates `There is something inevitable about Bob Dylan... A storyteller pulling out all the stops - metaphor, allegory, repetition, precise detail... His virtue is in his style, his attitude, his disposition to the world' Simon Armitage