Bob Dylan, during the 1965 recording sessions for ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’

I’ve given up trying to figure out exactly what I think about Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Though Dylan’s catalog occupies a lengthy stretch of one shelf in my house, and I have spent countless hours over the decades listening to his music, I agree with those critics who say there are novelists and poets more deserving of the Nobel Prize than Dylan — Haruki Murakami and Don DeLillo are perennials on most should-be-honored lists. And Dylan’s lyrics, while remarkably inventive and frequently “poetic,” often clumsily stand alone as poetry. They’re frequently little more than a jumble of words without the music and voice that gives them meaning and emotion.

And yet, why not Bob Dylan? Several playwrights have won the Nobel Prize, including Harold Pinter, Dario Fo (who died Thursday), Samuel Beckett and Luigi Pirandello. And plays, like song lyrics, are best performed, not read.

The Swedish Academy’s argument for awarding Dylan the Nobel Prize — “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” — is indisputable. Dylan won the prize, as Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield wrote Thursday, “for inventing ways to make songs do what they hadn’t done before.” There’s a reason we use the word “Dylanesque” to describe songwriters like Bruce Springsteen who bring a literary sensibility to their music.

Which brings me to “Bob Dylan in America,” a 2010 book by Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz. Dylan’s profound knowledge of American music and the “new poetic expressions” he gives its various strands are the subjects of Wilentz’s inviting exploration of Dylan’s influences and how he redefined them.

I reviewed “Bob Dylan in America” for the Austin American-Statesman when it was published. Because the book is relevant to the Swedish Academy’s reasoning for giving Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature, I republish my review here:

The allusive Bob Dylan

Sean Wilentz’s engaging new book, “Bob Dylan in America,” is as much a history of American culture as it is a history and analysis of Dylan’s music.

A history professor at Princeton University and the author of “The Rise of American Democracy,” and, most recently, “The Age of Reagan,” Wilentz is a refreshing and authoritative music critic — Greil Marcus with tenure. He’s a lifelong Dylan fan and the humorously self-appointed historian-in-residence for Dylan’s official website, BobDylan.com.

Wilentz’s appreciation of Dylan’s music goes back to his childhood. His father, Eli, and his uncle, Ted, co-owned the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, a Beat hangout. Uncle Ted lived in an apartment above the bookstore, and it was in his apartment that Dylan met Allen Ginsberg in December 1963. It was a defining moment for both men. Dylan, reconnected to “Beat literary practice and sensibilities,” Wilentz writes, would begin to move beyond “the limitations of the folk revival” he represented, while Ginsberg would seek “artistic enlightenment from Dylan.”

On Halloween 1964, Eli Wilentz took his 13-year-old son to see Dylan at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. Forty years later, Sean Wilentz revisited this concert when he wrote the liner notes for “The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall,” a writing gig that earned Wilentz a Grammy nomination in 2005.

“Bob Dylan in America” joins Peter Doggett’s “You Never Give Me Your Money,” a history of the long, litigious breakup of the Beatles, as one of two excellent books about 1960s icons to appear in the past few months. Like the Beatles, Dylan’s primary gift is alchemy; he creates a distinct sound from a mix of traditional music, folk, the blues, vaudeville, country, rock ‘n’ roll and gospel.

It’s been clear, from the sketchy liner notes on his eponymous 1962 debut forward, that Dylan works from an affectionate, respectful knowledge of various strands of American music, and that he takes what he finds and makes it his own. Throughout “Bob Dylan in America,” Wilentz enlightens readers on the depth of that knowledge. Dylan hasn’t just drawn from 150 years of American music to craft his songs, but from American history, literature and folklore. How many songwriters can work a line from an 1842 speech by Abraham Lincoln into a song the way Dylan does on “Summer Days” from his 2001 album “Love and Theft”?

Woody Guthrie is the early, obvious influence on Dylan — the point of origin even most casual fans of Dylan’s music can name — and the poetry of Ginsberg and the Beats is the tie that binds Dylan’s churning, densely packed lyrics to Walt Whitman. But it takes a longtime and astute student of American music like Wilentz to connect — or try, anyway — Dylan to Aaron Copland, a composer initially of experimental music who mixed “folk music and orchestral form, informed by his leftist political sensibilities” into thoroughly American compositions.

Copland and Dylan are kindred artists, Wilentz says, practitioners of an “amalgamating art.” Sharing a talent for making something new out of something old, however, along with the fact that some of Copland’s old Popular Front friends would later meet Dylan, marks a pretty indirect path to Dylan. The Copland chapter, which opens “Bob Dylan in America,” is interesting not because a sometimes fawning Wilentz convincingly argues that Copland anticipates Dylan but because Copland is interesting in his own right.

More relevant chapters are centered around Ginsberg, the 1964 Philharmonic Hall concert, the recording of “Blonde on Blonde,” the inspirations underneath Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue concert tour and Dylan’s mid-career masterpiece, “Blind Willie McTell.” McTell was a “songster” who worked in styles — the blues, country, folk — deeply familiar to Dylan. He was not an early influence on Dylan, but a later one, pointing toward a path Dylan began following in the early 1990s to revive his career.

The McTell chapter begins a three-chapter stretch that marks the book’s peak, as Wilentz explores the origins of “Delia,” one of the earliest examples of the blues, and the compilation of the hymnal “The Sacred Harp.” As he does throughout his book, Wilentz doesn’t confine himself to each chapter’s primary subject but takes us down numerous side streets and alleys before bringing us back to Dylan.

“Music not busy being born is busy dying,” Wilentz writes, making a play on Dylan’s famous line from “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” that “he not busy being born is busy dying.” (Wilentz promiscuously sprinkles references to Dylan’s lyrics throughout his book. A few underscore a point; others induce groans.) Since covering “Delia” and “Lone Pilgrim,” a song found in “The Sacred Harp,” on “World Gone Wrong,” his 1993 collection of traditional music that stands as one of his best albums, Dylan has grounded his music even more deeply in the past. He has acted almost out of a preservationist instinct to keep alive music he fears is at risk of disappearing, Wilentz says, bringing bits from here and there into the present to “reclaim and reassemble the American musical past.”

Such recycling has left Dylan vulnerable to charges of plagiarism from some critics, but such charges, Wilentz argues, misunderstand the tradition in which Dylan works. Throughout his career, Wilentz writes, Dylan “has been a minstrel, or has worked in the same tradition as the minstrels … copying other people’s mannerisms and melodies and lyrics and utterly transforming them and making them his own, a form of larceny that is as American as apple pie.”

As this informative book makes clear, without such larceny, popular music — any art form, really — would be merely derivative, and repetitive. Dylan reinvents. He not only is in America; America is in him.