Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right …
Bob Dylan is named 2016 Nobel Peace Prize winner for Literature.
Do you agree is Dylan the greatest’s American poet and one of the greatest modern writers?
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/13/world/nobel-prize-literature/index.html
His words have remained with me for decades. Their wisdom, and his genius, deserve this happy surprise!
It is the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Peace Prize is a separate award.
Wow! We are going to see him in concert this month!
I’m happy for Bob Dylan, of course. I love his music and recognize his genius. But I wanted my favorite living author, Margaret Atwood, to win and I hope she will eventually. I’m also thinking of Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates … sorry those writers couldn’t somehow have won, too. Still, it’s very fun to think of Dylan getting that phone call this morning.
No. Not at all.
Dylan is a great singer/songwriter, yes. Yes, his body of work, especially his early work, has significance beyond that of most other artists in that category. But the idea that he is the greatest American poet in a world that includes Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, TS Eliot, Marianne Moore, James Merrill and so many others is, to me, pretty ludicrous.
Frost won four Pulitzers and gave us such gems as Mending Wall and The Road Not Taken. Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass, showing us that poetry could be good even if it didn’t rhyme. Dickinson was able to condense mother lodes of depth into a handful of lines.
Bob Dylan is one of our best songwriters, but he has a long way to go to challenge America’s titans of poetry.
Perhaps the OP should have phrased it as “greatest living poet” since that is one of the criteria to receive the award.
For me, I don’t know. He’s certainly qualified but there are always more qualified writers than can win. It’s interesting that the science awards can have multiple winners depending on how many people helped to prove something. Writers have to stand alone, and the Nobel committee did refer to his 50+ years of writing and changing in granting him the award.
I am sorry but I think Nobel went bonkers with this one. Call me elitist but I’d prefer it went to somebody in literary circle. It’s not like BD need any more recognition or prize money.
I just did a little nostalgia tour on Youtube and listened to a 1963 Dylan performance of “Blowin in the Wind” and I thought he should have been awarded the Peace Prize for that song alone!
specifically,
Yes, and how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
…and
Yes, and how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
The prize for literature may seem like a stretch, but when you consider his entire body of work, I would say well-deserved.
I don’t have an educated opinion about the Literature prize but I’m going to see Bob Dylan at Desert Trip tomorrow night and it will be interesting to watch 75,000 give him some love.
IIRC, a few years ago the Nobel Committee was criticized for giving the literature prize to authors no one had heard of. I think they are trying to remain relevant to the masses with this pick.
I don’t know, thinking of poetry, I wonder if maybe this wasn’t a great idea, and here is why. Poetry doesn’t stand in a vacuum, it isn’t a construct of academia, it isn’t a rule based form (well, can be, for example Haiku, though Haiku has rules in structure it doesn’t in meaning or content), it is a way to express ideas and thoughts in a unique way, it is also designed to touch people.
I was thinking about that the other day, about Frost’s poem about the road less traveled (not the popular myth of a meaning,that the road less traveled is the better one, but the real one, people’s ability to rationalize their decisions and remember themselves has taking the road less travelled and it being the best one, no matter what they chose), that had a big impact on me when I understood what he was saying. (For the record, my favorite poet was Archie the Cockroach of Archie and Mehitabel fame).
Look at it in that light, then how many people did Dylan touch? We aren’t talking routine music, that Jimmy Buffet reduced down to “let’s get drunk and S**” along with other themes, much of his lyrics were about trying to express ideas and create thought and maybe change (I know, Dylan says he only was writing songs to sing, he wasn’t out to change the world, etc…believe that like when he says he still gets death threats for going electric at Newport in '65 *lol). If he touched so many people, if hearing those lyrics touched them, maybe made them think, then maybe he does deserve the award.
Is it the best poetry? Depends on how you define it, is it something an English lit professor would glow over the perfect structure or a critic could dissect down to nothingness, maybe not, but if something touched so many people for so long, maybe it should be, as a body of work few people have what Dylan did IMO. Problem with ‘literary’ poets is they may be great, but like the old thing about whether a tree in the forest makes a sound when it falls if no one hears it, if few people ever read the poem and are touched by it, is it really great in the sense that it did something for people ? (I am only putting that out as my viewpoint, thoughts, not that I am right, wrong or indifferent).
@musicprnt, I disagree with so many things in that post that I can’t even begin to address them adequately. 
You make a great case for suggesting that Rod McKuen and Shel Silverstein were amongst the greatest poets ever.
Those who read and study poetry devotedly–most of whom probably ARE in academia–don’t “glow over perfect structure.” They don’t “dissect [poems] down to nothingness,” they achieve greater understanding of what the poem is doing than the casual reader. There are MANY poetic forms that have set structures, the sonnet and the villanelle being perhaps the most obvious examples. Playing within and against the requirements of the form is one way in which poets achieve greater effects. (“Do not go gentle into that good night” by the original Dylan is a villanelle. Is that some dry “academic” poem that doesn’t touch people?)
Bob Dylan’s words are inextricably linked to his music and his performing persona. His words would be nowhere near as effective without both, and most likely no one would ever have heard of them. They are SONGS.
Let us not forget that the Nobel committee leans heavily in the direction of literature with a strong social justice/social concerns component. Hence the award to William Golding, apparently on the basis of one book. Dylan’s early work fits right in.
Here’s something by one of those poets beloved of academics:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49086
Shel Silverstein never claimed to be a deep poet, he wrote clever verse that was meant to be funny, I don’t think he would ever say he wrote to be another Robert Frost. Rod Mckuen was a pop poet, to me his poetry was the equivalent of a transient pop hit written to be digested quickly and forgotten.
My argument about Dylan is that his lyrics are poetry, in a different form, and that the music and performance is to me simply another way to express the poetry (think about the beat poets and how they often performed their works). Beautiful poetry has been set to music over the years, I have heard Shakespeare (the song “what a piece of work is man” is shakespeare poetry), Walt whitmans poems have been set to music, doesn’t mean that by themselves they aren’t beautiful, too.
The other thing is, why must it be that if they decide Dylan’s lyrics counted as literature, as poetry, how does that affect what Whitman or Frost or Sandburg or Dickinson or Rimbaud or whoever wrote, in their own way? Does the fact that he won this change what others write, if they stand on their own merits in their own way, what difference does that make. I don’t understand the automatic assumption that because Dylan was writing lyrics for songs, that somehow that makes it that he couldn’t be writing poetry for the ages. A lot of the poems now considered classics were often routinely set to music in the renaissance and baroque periods, does that mean they weren’t? I don’t know how Dylan writes his lyrics, but from talking to friends who are songwriters, they often write the music/poem first, then set the music to it, the only difference with my example is that those writing poetry by itself didn’t intend it to be set to music.
I am familiar with the idea that poetry does have structure, that there are forms that can be followed, my point was that poetry doesn’t have to follow those forms (music, likewise, has forms, classical music has a variety of them), but my point was the form is not the function, you work within a form because you feel as the writer it best works, the same way a musician chooses the form of his music.
Various points:
Poems being set to music is a completely different animal than a song with lyrics meant to be sung.
Could someone hypothetically write song lyrics that are poetry for the ages? Sure. My argument is that Dylan does not even come close to being America’s greatest poet.
Popular music has form also: the verse, the chorus, the bridge, standard chord progressions.
Did you read the Anthony Hecht poem? Here’s some more poetry for the ages:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43431
Congrats, Bob. Love that we cc’ers will debate just about anything!!
@consolation:
I didn’t say Dylan was America’s greatest poet, for the ages or living, but that designation is relative, not to mention that the nobel prize for literature doesn’t recognize America’s greatest poet, in part because there is no objective way to measure that, it isn’t a zero sum game, it isn’t like 'well, if Dylan won that, no one else can" (in the future), it is an award recognizing what they see as greatness, and that comes in many forms. I personally don’t consider Dylan to be the greatest poet America ever produced (I would make an argument for Whitman personally), and he likely isn’t the greatest poet now living given how many poets there are, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be recognized for his body of work IMO shrug. The nobel prize represents at this point of time what they felt, it sounded like it was a body of work.
My daughter is taking two advanced poetry seminars this term and said both of her professors are thrilled. She said one of her professors (in a contemporary poetry class) walked into class this morning joyfully singing along to Dylan blaring from a speaker. So at least some academics are excited.
(I was kind of surprised; I was expecting her to report that they had been disappointed by the choice as not being sufficiently literary).
In Europe, they’ve been talking about Dylan as a world-class poet for decades now. I’ve seen serious scholarly articles on Dylan’s work, and have heard British literature professors talk about him as one of the great poets of the second half of 20th century. I attended a lecture in France on Dylan’s poetry; the speakers felt his true genius – the thing that will have a lasting impact – is not his music, but his poetry.