Good stuff, Mark. I agree with everything you say there--except that for me Dylan at his best IS among the very best poetry ever written. Best ever, that is, in his chosen corner of the big tent of poetry: writing powerful verse to be sung. Yes, a Richard Wilbur (or whoever) can kick Dylan's butt in his corner of the tent, but vice versa! I mean, have you heard Wilbur's 80s albums?
I guess the debate over Dylan's appropriateness as a laureate seems to breaking down into three questions:
--whether poetry-song is or isn't "literature";
--whether Dylan is "great" enough;
--whether some other candidate or kind of candidate would have been better for aesthetic or cultural or representational or economic or political (in the broadest sense) reasons.
...probably all questions of taste, to some degree, that we won't resolve here...
I think it is worth pausing for a moment to imagine the difficulty (even foolhardiness) of picking only one such laureate a year when it involves comparing effectively all the "great" living (and they do keep dying) writers in the world--say, a Minnesotan songwriter to a Basque one to a Croatian novelist to a playwright from Vietnam to a Belorusian journalist to a poet from Egypt to a short story writer from Sri Lanka...--and then factoring in all the other concerns about idealism, politics, representation (didn't we give it to a Minnesotan six years ago?), etc...
I'll also say that I remember fondly (although I disagreed with it) an audacious essay in a tribute issue of Q magazine (I think it was for the 40th anniversary of Dylan's recording career, so in 2002...), which exhilaratingly argued the counter-position that, yes, Dylan certainly deserves credit as the figure who connected "pop music" with "poetry"... and that it's a shame it was he because he wasn't actually any good at either. The essay, in particular, said that Paul McCartney never got his due because music criticism focuses so excessively on words that it overrates a Dylan or a Lennon (don't see it, myself, but he's been hailed in this thread...) and underrated a "melodic genius" like Macca...
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