But something happens to great lyrics sometimes when you are familiar with the melody. They become something very close to "poetry." Not all of them, of course. The lyrics of "Sara" don't stand up, but, for me, "Tangled Up In Blue" survives on the page. Having first come to the lyrics through a musical performance, though, sort of trains your ear to a "meter" that is private to the particular lyrics in question. A metrical poem, of course, must come packaged with its own meter, and cannot depend on any sort of extrinsic training. Anyway, some song lyrics are closer to standing alone than others, even if the songs themselves are equally appealing to hear. Dylan does have a couple of lyrics in the Norton Anthology. Robert Burns has quite a few.
I agree with Richard's general point, though. I remember many years ago seeing Paul Simon be interviewed by some egghead on the BBC. The interviewer tried to get him to say that his songs were poems set to music, and PS naturally bristled at the invitation. No, he insisted, they were songs and there's nothing wrong with that, you don't have to call them poems to flatter them. (Last year, though, he couldn't resist publishing a book of his lyrics set out as if they were poems).
It's interesting somehow that songs seem to be about divorce a lot more than poems do. I think people started posting songs because they couldn't come up with many examples of poems.
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