This is an interesting question indeed. It's my sense, though, that Dylan appropriated far less than did Kaavya, which would get down to a fair use argument that I suspect Dylan would win and Kaavya lose. Moreover, I suspect (though I do not know) that Timrod's material is in the public domain, in which case that would terminate the comparison. Stealing material without attribution is different than legitimately using it without attribution. Finally, lets face it: the overal circumstances are different. Dylan is a folk singer/poet who is clearly a major contributor to literature and music during our time. Kaavya is a perky little academic overachiever who's "work" can be measured by the value that a few sleazy publishing agents and marketers placed on it. I.e., not much. Dylan has earned the right to be considered in a different light -- not least because we're talking about folk music, not fake memoir/novel writing -- and the implication that race or gender explains the difference in reaction is political correctness at its shiniest.
 

Dylan isn't a folk singer, and has been out of that phase since 1963 or so, having been a rock and roll singer before that in Hibbing High. His penultimate CD (2001) was called "Love and Theft", the quotation marks being very deliberately used since he stole the title from Eric Lott, who wrote a 1993 book Love and Theft: Black Face Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Which is highly relevant since Dylan is writing and singing Charley Patton/Blind Willie McTell-type adaptations of blues songs and apropriating everyone from Virgil to Junichi Saga (Japanese gangster novelist), with much in between, particularly from around the Civil War (Twain, and now Henry Timrod).

Eliot, whose Waste Land reworks Greek epigram, Virgil, Dante, etc., had it right as another Times letter notes:“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” That was Kaavya's main problem and the comparison is absurd, since Dylan clearly intends that we catch the "plagiarism".

Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Milton, all of the great poets, Dylan included, work like that and recognition of the reworked lines and transformed context contributes to the aesthetic effect -- if you actually listen to/read it instead of the snippings in a column or blog.

Now I go to the airport and sabbatical, so that's it for me!
 

Look out the saints are coming through...the airport.
 

The question we have to ask about literary borrowings is whether their new context gives them new meaning. If the words perform the same function as in the original, then it's not very interesting, and it probably amounts to simple plagiarism. The "strong poets" who "steal," as Eliot put it, also do something else with the words they use. The words acquire a new layer of meaning which may be ironic or critical, humorous or unexpectedly revealing, and much else. That's the real difference between effective and appropriate literary borrowing, on the one hand, and ordinary plagiarism, on the other. Legitimate literary borrowing is a very old technique that goes back to antiquity, and it can have very exciting effects as the borrowed words and phrases acquire new depth. Taking sentences from one chick lit text and putting them into another chick lit text is just plain plagiarism.
Judith Ryan
 

"A major contributor to literature and music during our time" is uncomfortably close to the excuse given by the defenders of Larry Tribe, Charles Oggletree and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Because they are major contributors to the legal or historical literature of our time, they are held to more permissive standards than students who are charged with plagiarism. The nuanced points made by Thomas and Ryan make me see Dylan's "plagiarism" in a better and more justifiable light. But they do not make (and I assume were not intended to make) the Harvard faculty plagiarizers look better. On the contrary.
 

To Anon 10.25 p.m.: Precisely.
 

In fact, Harvard has a pattern of leniency toward faculty misdeeds--consider the current Jones Professor of Economics, who enjoys the privileges of his tenured chair...