Bob Dylan's lyrics have been championed by poets Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure, compared favourably to Shakespeare by Professor Christopher Ricks, dismissed by the guardians of "folk music", chanted at the barricades of civil rights struggles and youth revolts - and rejected in their turn by the generation that followed.
What remains - and continues - is a solid body of work that reflects as well as any cultural document the preoccupations of its generation over a twenty-year period, but offers also an intense and eccentric lyric poetry of sharp images, tuned aphorisms and the rhythmic flexibility of the best American verse.
