From the Archive: Ian Bell on Bob Dylan. December 2013

Bob Dylan has played many roles in his life: voice of a generation, rock ‘n’ roll Judas, Christian convert, even Victoria’s Secret salesman. The one that concerned the SPL podcast in 2013 was ‘poet’. Across two biographies – Once Upon A Time and Time Out of Mind (both Mainstream) – Ian Bell (1956-2015) considered Dylan in a more literary context than any other biographer of His Bobness. Over the course of this podcast, we discussed whether Dylan can really be considered a poet, the writers who influenced him, his Scottish connection, and his encounters with poets such as Carl Sandburg, Archibald McLeish and Allen Ginsberg. Image: Bob Dylan, Paris, France 1966 by Paul Townsend, under a Creative Commons licence.