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Article: Blowin' in the wind.(Dylan's Visions of Sin)(Book Review)
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- June 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Christopher Ricks Dylan's Visions of Sin. Ecco (HarperCollins), 528 pages, $26.95
Whether writing on Tennyson, Eliot, Housman, Beckett, or many others, Christopher Ricks has always been a critic of exceptional learning and aplomb; that he has been generally given to a somewhat oblique, even eccentric angle of view--embarrassment in Keats, the subtleties of punctuation in Geoffrey Hill--has been to his credit, for while he is in one sense a traditional textual expert of rare authority (witness his editions of Tennyson and T. S. Eliot's smuttier verses), he has also exhibited a delightful ability to surprise. His new book is no exception, less so in its erudition ...