The speech itself is typically Dylan in a few ways: It seems perched between sincerity and trolling, draws from Western culture’s most elemental influences, and works according to its own logic. Reaction has been mixed; some people have pointed out that Dylan’s writing has the sophistication of a high-school book report (e.g.: “Moby Dick is a seafaring tale. One of the men, the narrator, says, ‘Call me Ishmael.’”). But part of the point surely is in the colloquial style of his retelling: He’s turning tomes into folktales. He’s also arguably doing something more subtle. Through summary, he’s showing how literature and song defy summary.

The lecture opens with him “wondering exactly how my songs related to literature” and then turns to his musical influences. There’s Buddy Holly, who at a concert, Dylan says, “looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something.” There’s the folk and blues legend Lead Belly, whose song “Cotton Fields” “changed my life right then and there.” And there are the American folk traditions: “ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs.” When he discovered folk tunes, he says, he realized they “were different than the radio songs that I’d been listening to all along. They were more vibrant and truthful to life.” This “vernacular” formed the basis for his own songwriting: “None of it went over my head—the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries.”

Then he turns to literature, citing the novels he read in grammar school as an important influence: “The themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally.” It’s up to the listener to propose parallels between his songs and the books he cites, and it’s not too difficult to do so. “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” for example, obviously pays tribute to Moby Dick with its character Captain Arab. But more than that, what Dylan describes as Melville’s collaging of “Zodiac symbols, religious allegory, stereotypes” is a decent definition of “Dylanesque” lyrics.

Dylan’s connection to All Quiet on the Western Front is also fairly clear, with his anti-war lyrics sharing the novel’s indignant, despairing spirit. “You’ve come to despise that older generation that sent you out into this madness, into this torture chamber,” Dylan says of the book’s protagonist, but the “you” could also be Boomer youth rebelling against the Vietnam War. Certainly the surreal carnage depicted in a song like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” isn’t far off from his rendering of Remarque’s descriptions: Dylan sang of “guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,” and now writes of “young boys who are of little military use, but they’re draftin’ ‘em anyway because they’re running out of men.” As for The Odyssey, Odysseus is a typical Dylan character: “a travelin’ man, but he’s making a lot of stops,” as he puts it.