Ripping off Henry Timrod.

Or perhaps more aptly, making Henry Timrod famous. Here's the evidence that Bob Dylan took bits from Timrod's poetry to do the lyrics for "Modern Times." But Bob needn't worry. Timrod won't sue or even complain. He's from the mid-19th century (and was known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy). Should we feel bad about Bob?

This isn’t the first time fans have found striking similarities between Mr. Dylan’s lyrics and the words of other writers. On his last album, “Love and Theft,” a fan spotted about a dozen passages similar to lines from “Confessions of a Yakuza,” a gangster novel written by Junichi Saga, an obscure Japanese writer. Other fans have pointed out the numerous references to lines of dialogue from movies and dramas that appear throughout Mr. Dylan’s oeuvre. Example: “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word” echoes a line from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

This time around Scott Warmuth, a disc jockey in Albuquerque and a former music director for WUSB, a public radio station in Stony Brook, on Long Island, discovered the concordances between Mr. Dylan’s lyrics and Timrod’s poetry by doing some judicious Google searches. Mr. Warmuth said he wasn’t surprised to find that Mr. Dylan had leaned on a strong influence in writing his lyrics.

“I think that’s the way Bob Dylan has always written songs,” he said. “It’s part of the folk process, even if you look from his first album until now.”

Well, theft itself is a traditional "process," but it would still piss me off if someone robbed me, either with a six gun or a fountain pen.

At least Dylan called an album “Love and Theft,” and he's repeatedly presented himself as a thief in various lyrics. To have Bob Dylan steal some of your phrases and the Dylan fanatics ferret out the connection he declined to tell us about is to get publicity you never would have gotten otherwise. You should be delighted, or, if you're dead, like Henry Timrod, we'll imagine you delighted, to have the grand old lyrics-master steal your words and send his listeners off to discover you.

Or do you think I'm ignoring principle and letting Dylan off the hook because I like him?