He was born on May 24th, 1941 and grew up in the north Minnesota town of Hibbing, listening to Hank Williams on late-night radio. With some teenage friends, he paid $5 to cut a vanity record: on one side Earth Angel, on the other Be- Bop-a-Lula.
Next he idolised Elvis, who failed him: the Pelvis wagged his outlawed hips on TV for a brief, glorious season before getting his hair cut and joining the US army. Then the youth worshipped James Dean, but he too disappointed: an outlaw who tried for revolution but settled for Natalie Wood.
The problem was obvious: American rebels had a dreadful habit of being coopted by the mainstream, which quickly commodified them and turned them into superstraights. American modernism, if it was to stay modern at all, was destined to struggle but never to triumph: and, in the wise words of the socialist Irving Howe, "in the end it must struggle in order not to triumph". This would be the central effort of Dylan's strange career.
He turned away from moon-in-June pop pap and found a new set of models, splicing hobo talk with hip. For a few inglorious days he backed Bobby Vee ("he was pretty hot", patronised Vee, "in the key of C") but soon was imitating Woody Guthrie's death-rattle, the ailing fading voice of a man about to die of Huntingdon's Chorea. "You gotta speak clearly, Bob", scolded Mrs Guthrie, insisting that her husband in the wholeness of his health "would never have sung like that". But still Dylan whined like a hound caught in barbed wire.
At the University of Minnesota he skipped classes, because they were coming between him and his true education. "Universities," he would later sigh, "are like old people's homes - except that more people actually die in universities." But he had already developed a sense of how academics would read him in the distant future. "If the Library of Congress ever asks you for these recordings," he told a startled girlfriend, "I want you to sell them for $200. Please promise me this." The ego. But also, the foresight.
Dylan's favourite student game was called Glissendorf: a sequence of Beckettian non-sequiturs like "it's raining", "that's cool", "well all right". The suppression of the links in the expository chain of thoughts and images would become the surreal method of such great lyrics as Gates of Eden and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.
Howard Sounes plausibly suggests that one of the least advertised influences was also one of the most pervasive: the Clancy Brothers. Dylan loved the outlaw glamour of Brennan on the Moor and used many Irish melodies. He seems, for instance, to have reworked The Patriot Game as With God on Our Side.
Much later, Dylan would himself become the most pirated recording artist in the United States. In the end, he assimilated the work of so many people that the ensuing blend was thoroughly his own: all lyric traditions converged in his songbook. But most of all the Irish: 30 years on, at a reunion with the Clancys, he still knew Roddy McCorley line by line.
Sounes tells the story well, offering much new detail on Dylan's girlfriends and on a mysterious but ill-fated second marriage. He offers vivid accounts of the psychosexual dramas which may lie behind songs like Ballad in Plain D and invigilates the many claimants to the title of Girl from the North Country. He shows how astutely Dylan avoided time-specific references, with the result that, unlike other 1960s music, his words haven't dated.
A scrupulous wordsmith himself, Sounes justly praises Hattie Carroll for telling the sad story "with the economy of a news reporter and the imagery of a poet". He celebrates Hurricane for condensing many lives and complex legal testimony into just eight minutes of clear narrative. Sometimes, Sounes gets a little sloppy and misquotes lyrics, probably not bothering to check because of over-familiarity (a likeable offence).
Dylan's golden period was really from 1962 to 1966: he was a medium through whom songs just flowed, often in unpromising conditions. He tapped out Chimes of Freedom in the back of a touring van: and wrote the sublime Mr Tambourine Man after a visit to the New Orleans Mardi Gras (and a viewing of Fellini's La Strada). He soaked everything up in those days, transmuting all influences into something rich and strange.
When he heard I Want to Hold Your Hand, he recognised at once that the Beatles had managed to revitalise the American popular music on which he had foolishly turned his back. Bringing It All Back Home (his greatest album, I think) celebrated a return to America of that music borrowed by Lennon and McCartney. Now, unlike Be-Bop-A-Lula, it would have intellectual as well as emotional appeal.
NOT everyone approved, for most folkies equated electric guitars with capitalist consumerism. When Dylan launched into Maggie's Farm at the Newport Folk Festival, the toeless-sandals brigade went into revolt. Pete Seeger (born, with a pleasing symmetry, on May 24th, 1931) shouted: "If I had an axe, I'd cut the cable".
For the next year, audiences across the world booed the electronic half of the show. At the Adelphi Cinema, Dublin, in 1966, I watched the folkies boo the introduction to Positively 4th Street, then sing all the words ("You got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend"), and then boo again when the song finished. Sounes says this happened everywhere. This was real modernism, of a kind never known by Elvis or by Dean: the Brechtian alienation effect unleashed into the world of popular music. At the Adeiphi, Dylan actually turned up the amps and turned his back on the muesli-eaters who protested.
Far from being a sell-out, he remained a pure artist. Only four of his singles made the Top 10 in the l960s and none went to the top slot. Soon, he was outraging even his newer followers by drastic re-configurations of his most admired songs, on a Yeatsian principle of constant self-renewal: "They do not know what is at stake/It is myself that I remake".
If a performer is someone who keeps his eye on the audience and risks the betrayal of his subject, Dylan was an artist who kept his eye on his subject and risked losing his audience. Though he justly admired the brilliance of the Beatles' lyrics, he regretted that they were inaudible at concerts and all but smothered by the grandiose instrumental arrangements on Sergeant Pepper. He preferred a clear lyric line: "In this room the heat-pipes just cough/The country music station plays soft/ But there's nothing, really nothing, to turn off".
The fans knew their assigned role: to keep him modern, new, unsold. Not for them a hero such as Mick Jagger who told an old black bluesman in Kentucky: "we sold out, but we did it for money, so it was OK". Dylan's fans were deliberately hard on their hero. "What is this shit?" was Greil Marcus's famous opening to a review of the ironically-titled Self Portrait: a collection of other people's songs. A Dylan Liberation Front congregated at Macdougal Street near his house every Saturday, in a fatuous attempt to rescue him from religion and to prove that his lyrics were drug-inspired. (But nobody heavily into the stuff could have written that well: as one poet joked, the druggies produced typing, not real writing).
Ultimately, Dylan ran out of composer's gas, but not before producing two of the greatest LPs of the 1970s, Blood on the Tracks and Desire. They contain some of the tenderest evocations of married love (especially in Sara): and they soothe the pain of a collapsed marriage by describing it so hauntingly well. On these tracks, as on Hattie Carroll, Dylan repeats the great technical feat of fitting long running lines into strict stanzaic structures.
Like all good storytellers, Sounes wants to end on a high and so he repeats the mantra-like praise for the fairly recent come-back album Time Out of Mind. It is, however, poor stuff compared with what went before: but no matter. Dylan has written 30 or 40 of the greatest songs of the 20th century across a whole range of human moods. He hasn't just reported emotions - at times he seems to have invented them. Even when stripped of their musical backing and left to their own devices on the printed page, more than 20 of his lyrics read like poetry. Last September at the Point, Dylan proved that he is still a charismatic stage presence, to equal that of Presley or Sinatra. Can any other singer-songwriter of the past century sustain such claims? I doubt it. The Never-Ending Tour, on which he has been engaged since the collapse of his first marriage, is the proof that his struggle not to triumph continues still. In every show, he undercuts his fans, his accompanists, his old songs and most of all himself. It is the strangest blend of charisma and self-deflation seen on the modern stage.
Declan Kiberd is head of the English department at UCD and author of Irish Classics