In the last few years, Bob Dylan has released two impressive albums of music. He has solidified his place among great American artists, and his resourcefulness, remarkably, has endured into his 60s. His art is a singular amalgam of literary and musical ability which he has sustained, with only occasional failures, over nearly a half-century. Of the latest two albums, 2006’s Modern Times is probably the more consistent; but even the more diluted power of Tell Tale Signs (2008) is a thing to behold.

Flippantly, I might merely set down a single sentence to compose my judgment — “He’s still got it” — and leave it at that. More mischievously, I might quote the final verse of “Spirit on the Water,” one of the former’s finer selections:

You think I’m over the hill
You think I’m past my prime
Let me see what you got
We can have a whoppin’ good time

I could do either of these things, thereby render a useful review of the albums, and spare the reader my further cogitations. But what fun would that be? Let’s ask the deeper questions.

What is Bob Dylan’s art? This is not so easy a question to resolve as it may seem. As a musician alone his talent is considerable, but not on the level of genius. As a singer, he has rarely exceeded mediocrity. As a written poet he is brilliant, but erratic and repetitive. But bring his literary power into concert with his musical ability and — well, bring them into concert and you shall behold his art. Whether you like this art-form is another question, for I do not deny that there are possibly disagreeable aspects of it. But in the end I think Dylan’s stature as an artist, but particularly an American artist, is assured.

Over time I have come to associate Dylan and H. L. Mencken in my mind. Allow me to explain: Mencken, despite a well-earned reputation for brilliant, derisive polemics, was most proud of his scholarly work The American Language. Say what you will about his sneers and barbs at the follies of American life, in the end that book demonstrates beyond all doubt his love for his country. Mencken was a magnificent patriot on the subject of language, insisting on the independence and glory of “the American language.”

Then we have Bob Dylan, who may go down as one of the greatest 20th century practitioners of that language. Few have influenced a language as Bob Dylan influenced late 20th century American. Phrases from his songs, like Hobbits, have a way of turning up in the most unlikely of places. I’ll not soon forget when a rural North Carolina sheriff, in the midst of a press conference on a missing woman, likely murdered, reached for some way to convey his department’s perseverance in investigating the crime — and, stammering, settled on a Dylan quotation: “we’ve got to just keep on keepin’ on.” The man was not gifted at impromptu public speaking, but he did manage to convey his meaning. More recently, in a dissenting opinion, none other than Chief Justice John Roberts of the United States Supreme Court quoted (page 36) Dylan’s most famous song.

And now Bob Dylan has given us, in a phrase from another masterpiece, “Mississippi,” a kind of summing up of the simple citizen’s reaction to the economic crisis that exploded into public view about a month before Tell Tale Signs appeared:

I’m standin’ in the shadows with an aching’ heart
I’m looking at the world, tear itself apart

Furthermore, Dylan’s innovations in the American language — drawn, of course from idiolects as varied as the upper Midwest and the Deep South — track very nicely with Mencken’s appraisal of what makes the language great and unique. (As an aside, this marvelous verse is curiously not heard at all in several of the versions of “Mississippi” in circulation; indeed, it appears only in a rather uncommon one. Curious indeed.)

After a careful and on occasion amusingly acerbic survey of the state of the literature on the distinctively American branch of the English tree, Mencken renders this judgment:

The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest as much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas. And in small things as in large he exercises continually an incomparable capacity for projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting parts of speech.

As an example, Mencken adduces the word rubberneck, which as a synonym for gawker or tourist, someone who cranes his neck grotesquely, really does show some flare. This word is, according to him, “almost a complete treatise on American psychology; it reveals the national habit of mind more clearly than any labored inquiry could ever reveal it.” He continues, with the thrilled delight that is so infectious throughout his superb book:

The same qualities are in rough-house, water-wagon, near-silk, has-been, lame-duck and a thousand other such racy substantives, and in all the great stock of native verbs and adjectives. There is, indeed, but a shadowy boundary in these new coinages between the various parts of speech … Corral, borrowed from the Spanish, immediately becomes a verb and the father of an adjective. Bust, carved out of burst, erects itself into a noun. Bum, coming by way of an earlier bummer from the German bummler, becomes noun, adjective, verb and adverb … American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows a greater fecundity and originality of fancy.

Now in a certain sense it would be impossible to demonstrate how neatly this description dovetails with Bob Dylan’s use of American. Songs are meant to be sung and heard, and only secondarily written about, if at all. So I am left merely (a) to assert my belief that when Mencken writes thusly of the American language, he describes Dylan’s lyrical art with remarkable accuracy; and (b) to sketch a suggestion of the evidence that would support it, relying on the interested reader’s knowledge of Dylan, or desire to gain that knowledge, to provide his own demonstration. The sketch will, naturally enough, be drawn mostly from the albums under consideration here, Modern Times and Tell Tale Signs.

Consider, then, the quintessential American experimentation, “hospitality to novelty” and “fecundity and originality of fancy” in these lines:

And these bad luck women stick like glue
It’s either one or the other or neither of the two (“Nettie Moore”)

I found hopeless love,
In the room above,
When the sun and the weather were mild.
You’re as fine as wine,
I ain’t handing you no line,
I’m gonna have to put you down for a while (“Huck’s Tune”)

When I was young, driving was my cravin’
You drive me so hard, almost to the grave
Someday baby, you ain’t gonna worry po’ me anymore (“Someday Baby”)

Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches
I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages
I been to St. Herman’s church and I’ve said my religious vows
I’ve sucked the milk out of a thousand cows (“Thunder on the Mountain”)

Well, I’m a stranger here in a strange land
But I know this is where I belong
I’ll ramble and gamble for the one I love
And the hills will give me a song
Though nothing looks familiar to me
I know I’ve stayed here before
Once, a thousand nights ago
With the girl from the Red River shore (“Red River Shore”)

I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes
I followed the winding stream
I heard the deafening noise, I felt transient joys
I know they’re not what they seem
In this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain
You’ll never see me frown
I owe my heart to you, and that’s sayin’ it true
And I’ll be with you when the deal goes down (“When the Deal Goes Down”)

Bob Dylan has long excelled at narrative songs — vague and hazy stories of squalor, folly and crime, usually told first person. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” or “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” or even “I Shall be Free.” On the surface there is usually a certain off-putting morbidity. But the note of novelty and surprise is in a subtle reversal of modern fashion: on careful examination what strikes the listener in these narratives is, quite often, not the squalor (for alas, it is a feature of the modern age to be bizarrely fascinated with the banality of human depravity) but the unexpected flashes of joy.

Frequently these narratives have evidenced a detectable regional character: they take place in, or move between, the Southwest, or the deep South, or the upper Midwest. The Blues Highway, from New Orleans to Minnesota, has been a fixture in a number of songs. They are also boldly and marvelously American, many of these songs. Mencken would not fail to discern it.

Or consider that Tell Tale Signs in structure is the very exemplar of “constant experimentation”: it includes numerous alternate takes, variations on old songs, new cuts of old material. Few musicians could sell such an album. Dylan has done a whole series of then.

There is also the matter of Dylan’s humor, also a uniquely American blend of sarcasm, absurdity, and dry wit. A fine example is the 1965 romp “On the Road Again,” which commences, start to finish, with a cascade of wild and preposterous hilarity:

Well, I woke up in the morning
There’s frogs inside my socks
Your mama, she’s a-hidin’
Inside the icebox
Your daddy walks in wearin’
A Napoleon Bonaparte mask
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, do you have to ask?

My own favorite line from “On the Road Again” is this one: “Well, I asked for something to eat / I’m hungry as a hog / So I get brown rice, seaweed / And a dirty hot dog” (who but an American would first think to set lines like that to the blues?) But perhaps for the skeptical among you, an anecdotal argument will carry the point of kinship between Mencken and Dylan better. ‘Round about 1965, that era of discontent, Dylan “went electric,” thereby alienating many folk fans. Legend has it that once while in England, Dylan, accosted on stage by some hecklers, looked at them, and pronouncing, “You want folk music? — here’s some American folk music,” went into the guitar-heavy, hard blues song, “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” Something tells me the provocation was not lost on his antagonists:

Well, you look so pretty in it
Honey, can I jump on it sometime?
Yes, I just wanna see
If it’s really that expensive kind
You know it balances on your head
Just like a mattress balances
On a bottle of wine
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Dylan would go on to hurl many scornful polemics at the generation which was as ridiculous as a mattress on a bottle of wine, the 1960s — as he would at many targets. Then, the bitterest cut: he would consummate his defiance of the 60s by releasing in the year 1968 an album of simple country songs, of sincerity and regret, which uttered hardly a word about war when the Vietnam War was all his peers seemed to care about.

I fancy what really turned him against the 60s generation was its anti-patriotism. So many of these people found America in a basic sense hateful. He could never accept that. Even as a Leftist Bob Dylan was a particularist, which is the first and most vital step in patriotism. He could never hate his particular native land. And when the system or philosophy of the 60s got done with its platitudes and abstractions, when it finished with street theater and clownish posturing, it was going to destroy America. It may yet accomplish our ruin. But the man who is sometimes foolishly said to have put this 1960s philosophy to song, the proclaimed Voice of a Generation, very certainly repudiated it. He repudiated it using the same sneers by which it was made. Now that, I venture, is experimentation, hospitality to novelty, and carelessness of precedent which Mencken could appreciate.

Two patriots: the scholar and the bard. Mencken, the elitist, unexpectedly found his love of democracy in the language of his native land. Dylan, meanwhile, demonstrated the democracy of his native land, and his own irrefragable love for her, in the warmth, subtlety and richness of his portrayals of America.

How else is Bob Dylan a true American in his songs and performances? It is, of course, the very thing that, however experimental, open to novelty and scornful of precedent it may in any given era be, now appears the most natural antagonist of enlightened society in the West — I mean serious traditional religion, Old Testament religion.

Bob Dylan is a born contrarian. In an age of shining Christian faith, he might have been a pop-culture Voltaire. But by the fine irony of providence, he lived in an age of faddish unbelief. He lived in an age when Chesterton’s famous line about the problem with the man who stops believing in God — not that he believes in nothing but that he believes in anything — was exemplified, and exemplified above all in the counterculture which imagined that Dylan was its poet and minstrel. And indeed there is a magnificent poetry in Dylan’s astonishing initial conversion. He didn’t convert to highbrow Anglicanism, or sophisticated intellectual Calvinism, or even to serene Roman Catholicism, with its ballast in the long history of the world. No: what Bob Dylan did was convert to apocalyptic evangelical Christianity.

There is arguably no book of the Bible that seems more calculated to arouse the fury and indignation of American pop-culture than the Book of Revelation. Naturally, Revelation became Dylan’s touchstone. And how marvelous it is to see liberals, who in any other circumstance would argue fervidly for the independence of the lyrical content of songs, squirm when faced with the lyrical content of these great songs of Christian hope and faith and judgment. If a rapper writes a song about sexual assault, the most brutish misogyny, we can be sure that music critics will solemnly counsel against letting moral repugnance get in the way of aesthetic evaluation; yet let those same critics hear a Dylan song which speaks of the vengeance of a righteous God, and likely that mask of critical detachment will slip.

Nothing is less “cool” in urban fashionable and enlightened society than orthodox biblical religion of the apocalyptic variety. Nothing, therefore, so distressed, bewildered and annoyed the society which accumulated around Bob Dylan and his music, than his very public conversion to Christianity. But still he could not be ignored. Only a fool (or someone narrow enough to judge only on the evangelism of its lyrics) could deny the greatness of, for instance, Slow Train Coming (1979), no matter how it confounded his fans. When it wasn’t the horrifying imagery — “Can they imagine the darkness / That will fall from on high / When men will beg God to kill them / And they won’t be able to die” — it was the hard words of St. Paul, as when Dylan put some of the themes of the Book of Romans to song in “Gotta Serve Somebody.”

Now and then the attentive reader will hear it reported that Dylan has repudiated his Christian faith. What a relief, you can almost hear the liberal music critic say; we can cheer Dylan again, now that he’s gotten over that weird evangelical enthusiasm. I specifically recall reading that Dylan, while still spiritual, now professes no “organized religion.” Ah the platitudes of modern argot! In truth the language of biblical Christianity has pervaded most of his lyrics — even before his public conversion. Let someone argue that “Gates of Eden” or “Shelter from the Storm” is innocent of biblical influence.

In Modern Times­ and Tell Tale Signs the influence is abundant, both open and subtle. I said above that even in many of Dylan’s darker songs, there are subtle clues to a deeper joy. This is the quintessence of Dylan, if you ask me: that unexpected touch of joy added to the darkest squalor. An excellent example would be his slow, mournful, astounding Civil War song, “‘Cross the Green Mountain,” with its echoes of the Book of Daniel: “Something came up out of the sea / Swept through the land of the rich and the free”; its stark musings in judgment: “all must yield to the avenging God”; and it similarly stark (and, indeed, quite true) statement on the death of “the great champion” (presumably Stonewall Jackson) who is “shot outright . . . by his own men.” And yet there it is again, the hope:

Let them say that I walked in fair nature’s light
And that I was loyal to truth and to right
Serve God and be cheerful, look upward beyond
Beyond the darkness that masks the surprises of dawn

“Serve God and be cheerful.” I am hard-pressed to find a better and more succinct counsel for an old troubadour to bequeath to his admirers. Bob Dylan is the great 1960s bard of radicalism, whose hurled imprecations against this or that ever speak of something deeper, of faith and of purpose. He is the voice of an anti-American generation who could never be at ease because he so loved his country. He is the poet of squalor whose signature touch is joy. He is an innovator of language and sound, and a man haunted by the God of the Scriptures. He is an American.