Quote:
Originally Posted by william z
But why do you assume Bob Dylan is a great poet? Judging by the comments here it seems many people do, but aren't they Dylan fans who presumably bought and listened to his records because they like his music?
Most of Dylan's fans are in fact products of the "counter culture" that came into being in the USA in the 1960's. I doubt if even Bob Dylan thinks of himself as a poet.
I am no big fan or judge of poetry, I only know what I like. My son (who has a PHD in literature) is a published poet and has written many reviews on modern poetry, laughed out loud when he heard Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
When I want to read, I pick up a book (or rather e-reader). When I want to listen to music I listen to it. I do both just about every day. They are not the same thing. If the Nobel comittee wants to make a category for popular music, that is their decision. But in my opinion, lyrics of popular songs are NOT literature.
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Well, my first reaction (as a huge Dylan fan) when I heard that he won the Nobel was not very enthusiastic. "Dang, now Pynchon will never get it!" was my first thought. I have listened to Dylan so much in my life that his lyrics have become almost too familiar, taken for granted somehow. Every year, as Dylan's name turned up on the betting lists at Ladbrokes, never as one of the top favourites, but usually with the same odds as, say, Pynchon, or Roth, or Rushdie, I took it as a joke and didn't really think that Bob would either win the prize or that he really deserved it.
Since he has been announced as the winner, however, I have been paying more attention to his lyrics once more, and am finding myself amazed at how brilliant quite a few of them are. (If you are interested, I will try to find the time to point out on a few examples why I think they are great poetry.)
As to your son's expertise: well, PhD, published poet, good on him, and yet there are guys with PhDs in literature who
do think that Dylan is a great poet, so it seems there is no agreement among the experts. Personally, I cannot really stand that expert business when it comes to literature. I've been reading lots of poetry for a very long time, and in the end you never know what hits you. Sometimes you can only point at something and say: "But isn't it obvious how great that is?" And then there is poetry that has been hailed as great, and whose merits I can see when I analyze it, and which still does nothing for me; Eliot's
Four Quartets? How brilliant, how clever, how well-constructed! Agreed. And yet how utterly plodding and boring (to me)!
Well, ...
One more thing about Dylan as a writer: The way his
Chronicles: Volume One, marketed and widely reviewed as a personal autobiography, is really a maze of phrases and sentences lifted from a huge number of sources, the ultimate cut-up, is rather fascinating.
This post on Scott Warmuth's amazing blog is a good starting point if you are interested in the writing techniques Dylan has been using for the last 20 years or so.