This album is so masterful, so unique, that it makes everything Dylan did before it seem like practice. Gone is the über-folksinger, the political gadfly — in their place is Dylan the teller of fractured stories, Dylan the dramatist, Dylan the chronicler of the interior soul of his time.

It’s a work that, like Moby Dick or Leaves Of Grass, hasn’t dated a minute since it first appeared, and never will.