[John Whitworth]

I don't see how Dylan's lyrics will pass as literature without the music. There isn't a Nobel prize for music is there?

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
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

What do the third and fourth lines mean, if anything? I thnk Dylan is well short of the Beatles in this line. Or Simon and Garfunkel. Or Cole Porter. Or even Leonard Cohen. I don't think I know anything by Bruce Springsteen. Or do I?

About half the Nobel prizes for literature are for gluggers. Tagore, for God's sake. And nothing for Hardy or Larkin or Auden.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Yeah, I think Stallings' response is the perfect one for this.

I have my qualms about it being Dylan (not lyricists in general), but that's a persuasive a case as can be made for him.

[Richard Meyer]

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

I don't see how Dylan's lyrics will pass as literature without the music. There isn't a Nobel prize for music is there?

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
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

What do the third and fourth lines mean, if anything?

You may be correct in your first comment, John. I think as concerns popular music, the lyrics and the musical accompaniment are contingent on each other.

I'm puzzled, however, by your question What do the third and fourth lines mean, if anything? I wish I had a dollar for every time you've mentioned on these boards that the sound of a poem is by far the most important thing and that "meaning" is of little or no consequence. If I recall correctly, Wallace Stevens is your favorite American poet, and the "meaning" of his poems is often a puzzle to many readers. Stevens himself said he didn't know what some of his poems meant.

Richard

[Tim Murphy]

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archive...-bob-dylan.php
Scott Johnson has an affectionate post at Powerline with links to some of his favorite covers, all singers better than Dylan. Odetta, Joan Baez, The Byrds joined live by the author in Tambourine Man, which I think is the closest he ever got to great poetry. It's an acid trip, and I used to listen to it tripping. We wouldn't have "Lucy in the Sky" without it.

[John Whitworth]

But Dylan means them to mean something. He is writing political stuff. The case of Stevens (no Nobel there either) is a special one. Dylan's lines are duff.

[Simon Hunt]

I find this another interesting take:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/fe...-prize-w444799

It's pop culture critic Rob Sheffield using Emerson and Shakespeare to argue that Dylan may not be "poetry" but is nonetheless a deserving recipient of the "most gaudy" literary prize.

[Richard Meyer]

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

But Dylan means them to mean something. He is writing political stuff. The case of Stevens (no Nobel there either) is a special one. Dylan's lines are duff.

Well, as concerns the "white dove" in Dylan's lyrics, it's probably not a difficult or great leap to conclude that the dove has something to with peace, since it's an ancient and universal symbol for peace, love, and hope. One is not under any obligation to embrace Dylan's lyrics as great poetry, but to declare the lines you mention as obscure and beyond meaning is rather nonsensical.

Richard

[Tim Murphy]

I did read Aliki's excellent piece in TLS. Like our friend Housman, the Border Ballads are my earliest influence, Robert Burns close behind.

[Quincy Lehr]

The Bob Dylan controversy, in some ways, seems to revolve around the question of the role twentieth-century small-ensemble guitar-and-vocal music (I'm deliberately phrasing this to collapse distinctions between country, folk, blues, rock, funk, etc.). There are questions of influence, of representation, even of seriousness. And that's fine. But here's where I come from. (Okay, white, American, male, forty, and moving right along....) I am a poet because of small-ensemble guitar music. Not so much direct influence, though it is a frequent source of allusion, but more actually turning me on to things. It wasn't always pretty (thanks for the Khalil Gibran phase when I was fourteen, assholes!), but I discovered the Surrealists, say, through goth rock. Much of what I know about French Symbolist poetry started with rock music as well. And I sure wasn't going to pick up the capacity of rhyme to intensify a point, strikingly make a surprising connection, make a dirty joke funnier, or just hold a stanza together through sheer rhetorical force from the trickle of contemporary poetry that reached a teenager in central Oklahoma in the 1990s and mostly bored me silly. Just as one can work backwards from Jimmy Page and find Robert Johnson, so too can one work backwards from the Cure and find Arthur Rimbaud. I liked the poetry the musicians were reading better than the poetry the poets seemed to like.

Also, as my colleague Fernando Velasquez Pomar pointed out yesterday, similar objections have been raised to playwrights getting the Nobel because, you know, you have to see it performed to get the whole effect. I suppose this sort of thing is a problem if one limits literature to that which is meant to be read silently. Preferably in a drawing room.

And to quote another colleague, isn't every year Joyce Carol Oates doesn't win a victory of sorts?

[James Brancheau]

Maybe Dylan did go to the crossroads. He did have some truly awful songs (the Medgar Evers song, whatever that's called). I think Ginsberg referred to him as a vessel. I'd agree with that.