Cass R. Sunstein, Columnist

How Bob Dylan Surpassed Whitman as the American Poet

The newest Nobel laureate celebrates self-invention as the ultimate freedom.

October 13, 2016 at 4:58 PM UTC

Cass R. Sunstein is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the author of “The Cost-Benefit Revolution” and a co-author of “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness.”

American cool.
Photograph: Express Newspapers/Getty Images

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Bob Dylan has surpassed Walt Whitman as the defining American artist, celebrating the capacity for self-invention as the highest form of freedom.

“He not busy being born is busy dying,” Dylan sang, in “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Reinventer of folk music, voice of the 1960s, blues singer, rock star, born-again Christian, champion of gospel, country singer, old-style crooner, and now winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dylan has found a million different ways to say the same thing. (He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman, and he sang, “You may call me Zimmy.”)