Has Bob Dylan plagiarized his Nobel Prize lecture using SparkNotes?

As widely reported, earlier this month, legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan finally delivered his Nobel Prize lecture and collected his prize money.

The 30-minute lecture saw the artist reflecting on how various musicians and bodies of literature - such as "Moby Dick" and "The Odyssey" - inspired his own songwriting, in a very personal piece of writing. BUT (and it's a big "but") there might be a rpoblem... part of it may actually have been lifted from SparkNotes.

According to "Slate", indeed, Dylan’s discussion of "Moby Dick" phrases curiously very similar to those used in the SparkNotes edition of the classic novel. What’s more, a majority of these descriptive sentences and characterizations don’t appear anywhere else except SparkNotes - not even Herman Melville’s book itself. Dylan reportedly never once mentioned utilizing outside sources for his lecture, and appeared to pass off the entire thing as his own.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison, via "Slate":

Dylan:
“Another ship’s captain — Captain Boomer — he lost an arm to Moby. But he tolerates that, and he’s happy to have survived. He can’t accept Ahab’s lust for vengeance.

SparkNotes:
“…a whaling ship whose skipper, Captain Boomer, has lost an arm in an encounter with Moby Dick…. Boomer, happy simply to have survived this encounter, cannot understand Ahab’s lust for vengeance.”

Dylan:
“He calls Moby the emperor, sees him as an embodiment of evil.”

SparkNotes:
“…he sees this whale as an embodiment of evil.”

Slate offers up nine more instances in which Dylan’s wording seems too suspiciously close to SparkNotes to be pure coincidence. Find that chart below.

If Dylan’s lecture turned out to be a case of plagiarism (and not some kind of trolling or something), it would be incredibly ironic considering the award he was given: the Nobel Prize in Literature.