Zimmerman bound or unbound?

What is going on here? What on earth is going on here? Christopher Ricks, the world’s leading critic of poetry in English, Frank Kermode and the American Helen Vendler his only rivals, has devoted, has lavished 500 pages of hard-core, hardback, exegetical analysis to the words which propel Bob Dylan’s songs. The issue is not proving a point about Dylan’s poetic talent. That could be achieved in an essay. Indeed Ricks has already written one, in the Listener, as long ago as 1972 when Ricks was 39 and Dylan 31. Now Ricks is 70 and Dylan in his early sixties and Ricks has decided to throw neither flowers nor tomatoes at Dylan from the stalls but a socking, concussing magnum opus. Dylan’s Vision of Sin reads less like a book about Dylan than a book about Ricks: one which transposes Keats’s tag about the ‘negative capability’ of the artist to the life and work of the critic.