Back when I was an English major, before the Derrida fad, before the queering, I said that, if you did not know Bob Dylan was a singer, if you did not know he was famous, if you did not know he was a culture icon – in fact, even better, if you had never heard of him – and you put Desolation Row into Norton’s Anthology and assigned it to a senior seminar, it would surpass all of the XX Century except Yeats, all of XIX except, possibly, Coleridge, and would stand with the top five poets of all time.
Nice to know the Committee agrees.
Appreciate your informed words.
I’ve spent my life around books, less so popular music, though I was young when Dylan was in his prime and so put in my time with him, very happily so.
Certain all of Dylan is not first-rate poetry (imho), and some of it isn’t poetry at all.
But he has set a high standard, over a half-century, for poetics, for meaning, for innovation and originality, and for continuing to explore both form and content, art and life...all of this within a musical universe of pure genius.
I’m glad to see the award to go him partly just so it doesn’t go to another oppressed, grievous, incomprehensible scribbler whose chief asset is that he/she isn’t from the evil West.
But mostly just because he’s earned it, and deserves it.
Go Bob!
Definitely (another ex English major) Dylan was a poet. Glad he received this recognition. I think very little of the Nobel committee though.
Al Gore, Barack Obama, Yassir Arafat??