Seattle ? Among the letters, articles and artifacts at the Experience Music Project’s new Bob Dylan exhibit is a September 1967 review from The New York Times. It begins: “It will be a good joke on us if, in 50 years or so, Dylan is regarded as a significant figure in English poetry.”

Ha, ha.

The college courses and lectures on his music, the scholarly interpretations of his lyrics, and his repeated Nobel Prize nominations years ago cemented his reputation as more than a song and dance man. Now comes “Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966,” the first major museum exhibit dedicated to his work.

“There’s cultural and political significance to Dylan’s music of that period,” says Robert Santelli, EMP’s director of programs. “It’s tied to the greater American story like no other period of his career.”

The exhibit, on view through September 2005, nicely complements the first volume of Dylan’s memoirs, released last month.

In the museum, visitors can take a good look at the guitar Dylan brought with him to New York in 1961, when he went searching for Woodie Guthrie. Side-by-side photographs show how much the young Dylan tried to emulate his idol.

Roughly 150 artifacts, gathered by Santelli and curator Jasen Emmons over the past two years from Dylan, other musicians and collectors, are on display. They include concert posters; harmonicas; handwritten lyrics; Dylan’s copy of Guthrie’s autobiography, “Bound For Glory”; hundreds of pounds of iron ore from Hibbing, Minn., where Dylan grew up.

The exhibit, which is being accompanied by panel discussions on Dylan, begins with Robert Allen Zimmerman’s teenage years in Minnesota.

From there, he goes briefly to the University of Minnesota, and from there, to New York. He stepped onto Manhattan’s snowpacked streets in the dead winter of early 1961 with his new name, Bob Dylan.

A worker's shadow falls on a photo of Bob Dylan among a display about the musician at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. 'Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966,' the first major exhibit dedicated to Dylan, opened Nov. 20.

At the height of it all, Dylan plugged in. Though his first electric release was “Mixed Up Confusion” in 1962, he stunned his audience by going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Dylan was booed. He left the stage, and came back with an acoustic guitar.

As a short film at the exhibit notes, the first song he played on it was “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

Indeed it was. That summer, the nation heard a song unlike any other on the radio. “Like a Rolling Stone” was so popular that it forced some stations to abandon their three-minute-song formats. Dylan had turned to rock, where he could begin to explore the “wild mercury sound” he heard in his mind.

His career saw many reincarnations, from his Christian period in the late 1970s and early 1980s to his onstage epiphany in Locarno, Switzerland, which inspired him to play more than a hundred shows a year through much of the 1990s — a pace he still keeps. Many of those shows are at college campuses, where Dylan has connected with a generation far removed from the baby boomers who first seized him as a spokesman.

“Bob Dylan’s American Journey” will travel after it closes in Seattle, though it’s not clear where yet. Minneapolis is one of the planned destinations.