Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone

Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone

There is a romantic image we have of how art flows out of the poet's mind. Bob Dylan, legal pad on his knee, cigarette in the ashtray, the sounds of Twenty-Third Street coming through the window. The song arriving in a single volcanic session. Six minutes of fury and precision, resulting in “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Harold Bloom

"Poetic influence — when it involves two strong, authentic poets — always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation."

The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry · 1973

→ On AI: Chapter 7: What Dylan Teaches the Builder

It didn't happen that way.

Here’s what we do know. Dylan came back from his 1965 England tour exhausted. He later said he was ready to quit music. What came out of him was not a song. It was twenty pages of what he called "vomit," a long, rageful, formless rant. He wrote