In his speech, Dylan states: "Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness."

In the SparkNotes book, Moby Dick is summarised as: "someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness."

Andrea Pitzer, a writer with Slate, went on to find, and AP verified, 20 other sentences with traces and phrases from the Moby Dick SparkNotes.

The cases Pitzer found are not blatant or explicit - there are no verbatim sentences, only identical phrases and similar phrasing.

For instance, Dylan spoke of how: "The ship's crew is made up of men of different races."

In the SparkNotes book on Moby Dick, it reads: "...a crew made up of men from many different countries and races."

Dylan has not responded to requests for comment.

But it is far from the first time he has been caught up in accusations of plagiarism.

He has long borrowed lyrics from other sources, with his 2001 album Love and Theft drawing criticism for lyrics seemingly culled from Junichi Saga's book Confessions of a Yakuza and Henry Timrod's Civil War poetry.

Even paintings from his 2011 exhibit, The Asia Series, were noted for their similarities to well-known photographs taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Léon Busy.