When Bob Dylan was the schoolboy Robert Zimmerman in Minnesota, he had an inspirational English teacher, the splendidly named Boniface J. Rolfzen, who, now in his 80s, still enjoys entertaining pilgrims to Dylan’s hometown.

So Dylan grew up receiving initiation into the riches of literature as well as rock’n’roll. (A Zimmerman essay on Steinbeck, marked with rigour, still exists.)

He briefly read English at university before dropping out, discovering folk and bohemia, and helping to shape the 1960s. The Dylan who had revolutionised song before he was 25 was always full of words.

Early work such as A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall drew on ancient balladry, Walt Whitman, the French symbolists and more. When Dylan went electric in 1965, fusing rock with what Christopher Ricks has called “the force of poetry” empowered him.

By then he seems to have read everything. He had absorbed the Beats and those who inspired them – not least Blake. Dylan read Howl long before he met Allen Ginsberg in 1963. He had read Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues before reaching New York. It was “the first book which talked the American language to me”.

Dylan often stresses music’s primacy: “I think of myself more as a song and dance man”, he said, adding that everything hit him at once, unseparated: “T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings . . . the newer poets and folk music, jazz . . . Broonzy . . . it all left the rest of everything in the dust”.

He has namechecked Keats and Shelley as favourites; all through his work the language of the King James Bible echoes and his albums show the influence of everyone from Scott Fitzgerald to François Villon, Auden to the American Civil War poet Henry Timrod. He hears the music of Robert Browning and Robert Johnson both. He says that we will have to wait a couple of hundred years to test his work’s real worth. That’s not a celeb’s but a literateur’s perspective.

Michael Gray’s Song and Dance Man (1972), was the first book to discuss Dylan’s literary merit. His latest book is Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell (Bloomsbury)

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