At  the news that Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, poets, at least judging from my Facebook feed, were either very much pro- or very much con- (often along generational lines), delighted or outraged, yet in both cases an anxiety simmered underneath, stemming perhaps from the feeling that poetry itself has slipped into insignificance, or at least lost the public’s ear. A prize going to a poet would have given the poet and the art form a larger audience.  “What about W. S. Merwin?”  (Here in Greece, “what about Kiki Dimoula?”) It’s an ancient paradox:  poets long to be popular, and celebrities want to be taken seriously.  Both look back to a time in some misty mythic past when a bard could be both profound and renowned.  But Bob Dylan arguably has a stronger academic claim than many poets to be taken seriously as a literary artist, at least if you look at the critical ink spilled on him, numerous books on his songs, analysing their allusive lyrics, including Dylan’s Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks. Poets would like people to think they take prizes with a grain of salt; it is, after all, posterity the poet aims at, not notoriety.  And a quick glance at the list of Nobel Prize winners in Literature since its inception in 1901 will whisper “sic transit gloria mundi” to the laurelled ear.  I hardly recognize a name in the first twenty years of the prize besides Kipling and Tagore.  (The list contains surprises about who is on and who is not – strange to remember that Winston Churchill got one.)

Is Dylan rooted enough in literature, original enough in his contribution, influential enough?  He is clearly deeply engaged with both the literary tradition and popular song of the West, mixing the two in ways that changed American music, and influenced poets as well.  Song has been divorced from poetry for a long time, at least in the English-speaking world.  I think that is to the impoverishment of poetry.  There is the Shakespeare of dramatic blank verse, for instance, and the Shakespeare of the sonnets, but there is also the Shakespeare of the songs – and it is the songs that perhaps influence literature as much as anything else – lyrics made to be sung, but which we perceive now as words on a page.  Songs and poetry were once indistinguishable (Sappho famously is supposed to have invented the Mixolydian mode), and have continued to feed one another: A. E. Housman, for instance, claimed that his influences were the Scottish Border Ballads (folk songs), the songs of Shakespeare and the poet Heinrich Heine (whose poems were themselves often set to music).

I know of few contemporary poets who began writing in the late twentieth century who were not at some point inspired, listening to the lyrics of Bob Dylan, to reconsider what was possible in a poem – what kind of music (rhyme and rhythm), contemporary references, high and low registers, political and personal sentiment, and literary allusions could get into a popular and powerful work of words.  The honouring of Dylan is a reminder of poetry as utterance as well as text, and a reminder that a “poet” is, literally, a maker.  Perhaps the perceived irrelevance of much of contemporary poetry is a function of poetry’s turning its back on song, turning a deaf ear to audience. Dylan doesn’t need the Nobel Prize in Literature, it will neither help nor hinder him, but literature is weakened without song.