A poet of my acquaintance was incensed when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2016. He bridled when the Nobel committee deemed Dylan the creator of “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” “He writes lyrics,” the poet sniffed, perhaps forgetting that the Greek and Romantic lyric poets bore that epithet for a reason, perhaps ignorant of the troubadours as well.

Meanwhile, a middling genre novelist wondered whether Dylan’s Nobel meant that she was eligible for a Grammy, not stopping to consider whether her work occupied a place remotely near Constellation Dylan. And a classical music critic (whose name you will not have heard of) sneered, “They couldn’t find a writer so a musician was the next best thing?”

Dylan, of course, is the lyricist behind some of the best-known songs of our time, evoking T.S. Eliot, watchtowers, God, love, loss, and a thousand other things. He is also a writer pure and simple, those critics notwithstanding.

There were all those thousands of lyrics, of course, indisputably poems set to music. Then, 50 years ago, came Tarantula, an odd exercise in literary psychedelics that took off where John Lennon’s A Spaniard in the Works ended. It was not well liked when it appeared, and indeed Dylan had held off publishing the book, finished in 1966, for five years, past the shelf life of first-generation hippiedom and the neo-Beats. “Crystal jukebox queen and hymn [and] him diffused in drunk transfusion wound would heed sweet soundwave crippled [and] cry salute to oh great particular el dorado reel [and] ye battered personal god,” Dylan wrote.

Haters hated, and how—but a first edition of the book commands a small fortune today.

Dylan revealed his interest in strategy and self-invention in Chronicles, Volume One (2004), whose title promised more volumes that have yet to materialize. He read von Clausewitz and Machiavelli, studied mathematics and the blues and the Civil War, borrowed chords and tropes from everyone whose couch he ever kipped on. He built an encyclopedic knowledge of American folk music, a corpus that begs to be appropriated and reshaped and that, Dylan writes, is made up of songs that have a thousand faces, “and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.” (That thousand-faces business explains why Dylan’s songs sound so different from performance to performance, why his voice has mutated and morphed over the generations.) Artifices and all, Chronicles is the real deal: Open it, and it’s immediately apparent that you’re in the presence of literature.

Bob Dylan, who turns 80 on May 24, has been accused of owing far more debts, literary and musical, than he has ever acknowledged. Still, a poet, a writer, is a bricoleur, in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ formulation—a magpie who appropriates and uses every scrap of information that passes by. That a bricoleur can also be a trickster compounds the sins, but Dylan’s evasions and calculations are more in the spirit of Groucho Marx than of your everyday grifter. Made up of borrowed bits and pieces, he remains an American original. Long may he endure.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.