Dylan scholar Michael Gray wrote: "To have followed up one masterpiece with another was Dylan's history making achievement here ... Where "Highway 61 Revisited" has Dylan exposing and confronting like a laser beam in surgery, descending from outside the sickness, "Blonde on Blonde" offers a persona awash inside the chaos ... We're tossed from song to song ... The feel and the music are on a grand scale, and the language and delivery are a unique mixture of the visionary and the colloquial." Critic Tim Riley wrote: "A sprawling abstraction of eccentric blues revisionism, "Blonde on Blonde" confirms Dylan's stature as the greatest American rock presence since Elvis Presley." Biographer Robert Shelton saw the album as "a hallmark collection that completes his first major rock cycle, which began with "Bringing It All Back Home"". Summing up the album's achievement, Shelton wrote that "Blonde on Blonde" "begins with a joke and ends with a hymn; in between wit alternates with a dominant theme of entrapment by circumstances, love, society, and unrealized hope ... There's a remarkable marriage of funky, bluesy rock expressionism, and Rimbaud-like visions of discontinuity, chaos, emptiness, loss, being 'stuck'."