Yes, Bob Dylan's poetry work is worthy of the Nobel prize for literature.
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1proximity1
Some poets are great writers :
Ovid, Shakespeare, Blake, for example.
Yes, Bob Dylan's poetry work is worthy of the Nobel prize for literature.
By the way, Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell --a politician/historian and a mathematician/philosopher/historian, respectively-- also won the Nobel prize for literature.
Ovid, Shakespeare, Blake, for example.
Yes, Bob Dylan's poetry work is worthy of the Nobel prize for literature.
By the way, Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell --a politician/historian and a mathematician/philosopher/historian, respectively-- also won the Nobel prize for literature.
2DugsBooks
My bet is that Dylan was more surprised than most by the award. News articles so far only say there has been no comment by Bob yet. I postulated elsewhere that maybe Bob swooned, fainted at the news - but since I just found out winners are notified by phone I wonder how long it took to vet the call & realize it wasn't a prank!
3barney67
No, he doesn't deserve it, but so what? That award, like all awards, has already been given to people who don't deserve it. I like some of Dylan's songs, and I enjoyed his inchoate memoir, but no pop lyric is literature. Once again a question of definition.
It is possible to like Dylan and still think he didn't deserve the award.
It ought to teach us something about awards.
It is possible to like Dylan and still think he didn't deserve the award.
It ought to teach us something about awards.
4barney67
from shmoop.com (yes, shmoop.com. I know.)
"Vomit." That's what Bob Dylan called the lyrical brainstorm that brought "Like A Rolling Stone" into being.
"I'd literally quit singing and playing," Dylan told a CBC interviewer in 1966, "and I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit about twenty pages long, and out of it I took 'Like a Rolling Stone' and made it as a single" (Mark Polizzotti, Highway 61 Revisited, p. 32).
Dylan had quit singing and playing because his sudden stardom was somewhat unwelcome. Rising to the top of the folk revival, in the midst of the swirl of social change that his songs had come to represent, Dylan had inadvertently become an icon. At 25, he was suddenly being called "the voice of a generation." His 1965 tour of the UK is well-documented in the searing documentary Dont Look Back, in which a brooding and angry Bob Dylan takes the stage to sing about peace and love to packed houses, and then returns backstage to mock and berate the people around him.
"I don't believe in anything," he told a reporter in 1965. "I don't see anything to believe in." And on the subject of his already-iconic songs about the politics of the time: "I don't have anything to say about 'em. They don't have any great message."
Whether or not Dylan really believed that his songs ("Blowing In The Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'") were devoid of meaning, his frustrations with the media, and with the entire idea of being a folk hero, were evident in interview after interview. "I could tell you, I'm not a folksinger, and explain it, but you wouldn't understand it," he spat at a reporter from Time. "Do you think anybody that comes to see me is coming for any reason other than entertainment?"
"Vomit." That's what Bob Dylan called the lyrical brainstorm that brought "Like A Rolling Stone" into being.
"I'd literally quit singing and playing," Dylan told a CBC interviewer in 1966, "and I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit about twenty pages long, and out of it I took 'Like a Rolling Stone' and made it as a single" (Mark Polizzotti, Highway 61 Revisited, p. 32).
Dylan had quit singing and playing because his sudden stardom was somewhat unwelcome. Rising to the top of the folk revival, in the midst of the swirl of social change that his songs had come to represent, Dylan had inadvertently become an icon. At 25, he was suddenly being called "the voice of a generation." His 1965 tour of the UK is well-documented in the searing documentary Dont Look Back, in which a brooding and angry Bob Dylan takes the stage to sing about peace and love to packed houses, and then returns backstage to mock and berate the people around him.
"I don't believe in anything," he told a reporter in 1965. "I don't see anything to believe in." And on the subject of his already-iconic songs about the politics of the time: "I don't have anything to say about 'em. They don't have any great message."
Whether or not Dylan really believed that his songs ("Blowing In The Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'") were devoid of meaning, his frustrations with the media, and with the entire idea of being a folk hero, were evident in interview after interview. "I could tell you, I'm not a folksinger, and explain it, but you wouldn't understand it," he spat at a reporter from Time. "Do you think anybody that comes to see me is coming for any reason other than entertainment?"
5barney67
"It wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick…I didn't know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was (…) If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that. As for what time it was, it was always just beginning to be daylight and I knew a little bit about history, too—the history of a few nations and states—and it was always the same pattern. Some early archaic period where society grows and develops and thrives, then some classical period where the society reaches its maturation point, and then a slacking off period where decadence makes things fall apart. I had no idea which one of these stages America was in. There was nobody to check in with. A certain rude rhythm was making it all sway, though. It was pointless to think about it. Whatever you were thinking could be dead wrong" (Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. I, p. 35).
6proximity1
Ἰλιάς and Ὀδύσσεια were originally "just" "pop lyrics"
8southernbooklady
>6 proximity1: Just because it is popular doesn't mean it isn't literature! :-)
9librorumamans
If the committee wanted to go that route (in English), I wonder about Leonard Cohen instead, but of course Alice Munro won a couple of years back so Canada would be out of consideration.
