I have a few mixed feelings about this award, but I generally applaud it. Dylan is a composer (lyricist and musician) and a performer (singer and musician). In such cases is is hard to separate the three roles; most song lyrics fall rather flat on the page, but we can still appreciate the verbal dexterity of Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Fields, Hart, Sondheim, and many others. As a performer, vocally and instrumentally, he has been a tremendous influence. As a musical composer he has written many songs that "stick" after many years; if you gave me the title of any of the songs in something early like "The Freewheeling Bob Dylan" I could still passably hum you the melodies of most of them and recite the lyrics of a few. The problem is that there is no Nobel Prize in the Arts. Are his lyrics "literature" at all, poetry specifically? I think so. If "literature" is something to be read, then all of Dylan's lyrics are in print for those who choose to read instead of listen. Many of them are memorable, and they have reached millions more people than the words of any poet of the last century. Because the Nobel so often goes, justly or unjustly, to writers with humanitarian concerns (Pearl Buck?) I would argue that Dylan's long career has been consistent in many of these concerns and that they have moved many, many people to action. Maybe the Civil Rights Movement or the Anti-Vietnam War protests would have still happened without "Blowin' in the Wind" or "Masters of War," but Dylan's songs were at the forefront as anthems, as rallying cries. His work has had a huge impact on the world of the last half-century, mostly for good, I think. I have no serious objections to his receiving the prize. I congratulate him on it. After all, I came to poetry through song lyrics, listening to them and performing them, and they were the first "lyrical" words to make an impression on me in spite of my English teachers' attempts to make me appreciate Famous Poetry. I did that later, on my own.
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