The New York Times tries hard to find someone who will object to Bob Dylan's latest obscure borrowings, this time from Civil War poet Henry Timrod on several tracks from his new album Modern Times (a masterpiece, by the way).
As I argued the last time around (in a post Christopher Hitchens called "deft" and "objectively pro-terrorist"), there's really no scandal here, no matter how many Albuquerque middle school Spanish teachers you have on your side.
I also note with amusement the argument that Bob crossed a line by being too erudite for most of America, because �plagiarism wants you not to know the original, whereas allusion wants you to know.� Is it Bob's fault that the rest of us have never read Timrod? How many people knew that Whitman poem I dug up last time? For that matter, the Times charts a Timrodism in a song called Spirit on the Water, without noting that the title of that song and its opening lines ("Spirit on the water/Darkness on the face of the deep") are equally "stolen." I'll generously assume this goes unsaid because in that case the source is so familiar. But it's at least possible that those liberal elites at the Times are no more familiar with the Bible than they are with Henry Timrod.
