I bought a couple of his records when they started coming out in the 1960s. Indeed, I bought a turntable so I could listen to them. A human voice coming out of a loudspeaker! How refreshing! What a relief from gangster sleaze & mechanized tantrums! But that novelty wasn't enough to keep me buying his records, or even to keep me listening to the ones I had. And I never learned even one of his songs all the way thru.

So I guess, if I were into rating people, I would rate Dylan lower than the authors (many of them anonymous) of the songs & poems I have bothered to learn or have at least returned to over the years. However, I believe that such comparisons are worse than pointless; they are vicious. They are part of the apparatus of fame, and fame, in my judgement, is an evil. It is an old evil, deeply rooted in human nature, and made worse in recent times by technical progress. In all those respects it resembles war. I have no notion of getting rid of it, but at any rate I do not contribute to it.