SOURCE: Sumner, Carolyn. “The Ballad of Dylan and Bob.” Southwest Review 66, no. 1 (Winter 1981): 41-54.

In the following essay, Sumner discusses the recurring imagery and themes found in Bob Dylan’s songs as they relate to his own personal experiences.

A striking feature of Bob Dylan's art, and one which suggests the possibility of analysis, is the continuity over the years of certain imagery in his lyrics. His songs grow out of a few consistently held concerns which have gathered about them clusters of repeated images. These images, and the themes that grow from them, emerge primarily from the material of his own life, most dramatically from his poor-little-rich-boy position as the most brilliant superstar of the generation that created the troubled magnitude.

Astronomy is not the only dark stage on which the supernova is a death trip. The most far-reaching of Bob Dylan's artistic concerns, therefore, has been...