I will bow to your expertise in literary criticism.
All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities.
This is critic speak. I've read (the rare) interviews with Dylan, and he never speaks this way. Besides cramming 3 clichés into a single sentence, it's hard to imagine Dylan defining his own output as expressing "powerful new realities". Lame. That's usually the way to define other people's works not your own. It sounds like a record company marketing slogan, or talking points. Unless, he (Dylan) has trouble writing prose style (also hard to believe, since his lyrics are so cliche free.) Enough. I'll walk over to Barnes&Noble later and read the whole thing.