Come writers and critics who prophesise with their pens, Dylan is not about a-changin’

The Swedish Academy announces the Nobel Prize in Literature via press release, October 2016:

Bob Dylan … for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.

In agreement with the academy, Fairfax journalist Imre Salusinszky was quoted by the German Press Agency:

The fact Dylan can be folkie, rocker, mellow country crooner or bluesman at will is extraordinary, but only as a demonstration of blazing artistic talent. It’s no more a puzzle than that Shakespeare could be comedian and tragedian, or that Blake could write delicate lyrics at the same time as churning out sprawling epics.

Critic Peter Craven in The Weekend Australian, Saturday:

You can make a case that Dylan is very like Rimbaud — the French teenager who wrote some of the greatest poetry of the later 19th century — not in his relationships but in his relation to language.

Poetry Foundation website:

It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry on subsequent practitioners of the genre. His impact on the Surrealist movement has been widely acknowledged, and a host of poets, from Andre Breton to Andre Freynaud, have recognised their indebtedness to Rimbaud’s vision and technique.

Dallas Observer, August 9:

Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America, a book that explores the … influences he’s made on the American landscape with his music, puts Dylan on the same literary level as American literary greats like Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe who he writes can see “the symbolic in the everyday and then (tell) stories about it. Some of those stories can be taken to be, literally, about America, but they are all constructed in America, out of all of its bafflements and mysticism, hopes and hurts.”

The Independent, London, quotes Dylan’s speech, August 8:

When I first received this Nobel prize for literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature.

The Independent went on:

After weeks of silence … Dylan pondered where he fit into the grand scheme of landmark literature … Dylan embarked on a dizzying voyage into his musical influences … Reflections on Aristotle and Plato were interspersed with surprising appreciations of All Quiet on the Western Front and Moby-Dick. “I took all that with me when I started composing.”

More from Peter Craven:

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll that had as its refrain “But you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears” where “philosophise” is used in the sense of rationalise but the upshot has a Shakespearean effect; it’s as if Dylan bypasses ordinary literary language to create a kind of sung poetry shorn of artifice.

Journalist Craig McGregor, who struck up a friendship with Dylan during his first visit to Australia in 1966, tells the ABC, October 2016:

We go along as an act of homage to him as a songwriter, not to be transformed by his performance.

Dylan’s speech for the 2016 Nobel Banquet pondered Shakespeare:

His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider … “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?’ I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”