But maybe you've heard his words, if you're one of the 320,000 people who so far have bought Bob Dylan's latest album, "Modern Times."

It seems that many of the lyrics on that album, Dylan's first in 30 years to reach No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 album chart (down to No. 3 this week), bear strong echoes of the poems of Timrod, a Charleston, S.C., native who wrote poems about the Civil War. Timrod died in 1867 at age 39.

"More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours," the 65-year-old Dylan sings in "When the Deal Goes Down," one of the songs on "Modern Times." Compare that to these lines from Timrod's "Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night":

A round of precious hours

Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked

And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers.

"No doubt about it, there has been some borrowing going on," said Walter Brian Cisco, who wrote a 2004 biography of Timrod, when shown Dylan's lyrics. Cisco said he could find at least six other phrases from Timrod's poetry that appeared in Dylan's songs.

But Cisco didn't seem particularly bothered by that. "I'm glad Timrod is getting some recognition," he said.

During Timrod's lifetime, he published only one volume of poetry. Among his most famous poems were "Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina 1866," and "Ethnogenesis." Cisco said he could not find any phrases from these poems in Dylan's lyrics.

Dylan does not acknowledge any debt to Timrod on "Modern Times." The liner notes simply say "All songs written by Bob Dylan" (although some fans have noted online that the title of the album contains the letters of Timrod's last name).

Nor does he credit the traditional blues songs from which he took the titles, tunes and some lyrics for "Rollin' and Tumblin' " and "Nettie Moore."

This isn't the first time fans have found striking similarities between 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 Dylan's oeuvre. Example: "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word" echoes a line from "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

Scott Warmuth, a disc jockey in Albuquerque, N.M., and a former music director for WUSB, a public radio station in Stony Brook, N.Y., discovered the concordances between Dylan's lyrics and Timrod's poetry by doing some judicious Google searches. Warmuth said he wasn't surprised to find that 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."

Warmuth noted that Dylan may also have used a line from Timrod in " 'Cross the Green Mountain," a song he wrote for the soundtrack to the movie "Gods and Generals," which came out three years ago. Warmuth said there also appeared to be passages from Timrod in "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum," a song on "Love and Theft."

Dylan has long been interested in the Civil War: In "Chronicles: Vol. 1," his autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 2004), he writes about spending time in the New York Public Library combing through microfilm copies of newspapers published from 1855 to 1865. "I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone," Dylan wrote.

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