Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald is performing a sly act of cultural matchmaking: he yokes Bob Dylan, the scruffy emblem of modern American restlessness, to Homer, the monumental source code of Western epic. The key word is "invention". Dylan isn’t just a songwriter with a guitar; he’s a constructed figure, a voice engineered out of folk tradition, mass media, and self-mythology. Fitzgerald, a classicist and translator, knows that Homer is an "invention" too - less a single biographical author than a name for a long, communal process of composition and performance.

The quote’s wager is that the real continuity isn’t between page and page, but between ear and ear. Homer’s poems were built to travel through breath, rhythm, and memory; Dylan’s songs, however electrified by radio and records, still depend on that ancient contract with listeners: you don’t merely decode them, you receive them in time. By framing Dylan’s guitar as an instrument of tradition rather than rebellion, Fitzgerald gently strips away the high/low culture border patrol that would exile popular music from serious art.

There’s also a defensive note aimed at the literary establishment. Fitzgerald implies that the academy’s devotion to texts can miss the primal technology of culture: performance. Dylan becomes a modern rhapsode, not because his lyrics are "poetic" in a classroom sense, but because his work is designed to be carried, repeated, and lived with. The subtext: if you revere Homer while dismissing Dylan, you’re not protecting standards - you’re ignoring how standards were made.