“You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet,” Bob Dylan once said. “Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets. I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.”

Perhaps Bob Dylan has always resisted labels because he has found himself defined and redefined in public so often. He was originally hailed as the musical heir apparent to Woody Guthrie, a rebel with a cause, the most promising and galvanic of the young New York-based folkies Pete Seeger called “Woody’s children.”

Then he  was transformed into  a renegade rock and roller, a gaunt vision in black who unleashed his stream of consciousness with a stark beat and created a new kind of pop music that was brilliant, challenging, even downright dangerous.