“Oxford Town around the bend / Come to the door, he couldn’t get in”, sings Bob Dylan in “Oxford Town”, a track from his album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1962). The song refers to the enrolment of James Meredith (a black student) at the University of Mississippi that year, and it unites several of the concerns faced by critics attempting to transpose Dylan into the academic sphere: how authentic is he in his commitments? How poetic is his songwriting? How powerfully are such lyrics affected in performance by his voice and music? He is singing of Oxford, Mississippi rather than Oxford, England, of course; but Dylan himself has managed spectacularly to “get in” to the latter.

A former Oxford Professor of Poetry (Christopher Ricks) has described him as “a genius of and with language”, and has written on him extensively; more recently, the incumbent Professor, Simon Armitage, has taken up the subject in the wake of last year’s Nobel Prize announcement. Armitage’s second lecture of this academic year was deservingly well attended, offering something of everything (except, alas, some singing from the lecturer himself, in the manner of Geoffrey Hill), and suggesting both a growth in ambition and a tightening of focus compared with his previous Oxford lectures. If Armitage’s goal was to offer food for thought, he was certainly successful.

In 1962 it would have been strange to imagine Dylan, described by Armitage as “sometime patron saint of the anti-establishment”, one day winning the Nobel. At the least, fans might have expected him to respond as Doris Lessing did in 2007: with an indiscreet eye-roll and a sigh, followed by the words “Oh, Christ”. But as Armitage observed in his lecture (entitled “We Need To Talk About Robert: Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize for Literature”), “the problem with sticking it to the man . . . is that the better at it you become, the more you become the man himself”.

In light of this authenticity paradox, Armitage asked whether we should expect sincerity from a rock star. Should we instead assume and welcome caprice (as Wilde had it, “consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative”), transformation and a refusal to bow even to their own rules? If this is the case with Dylan – a number of his famed self-contradictions were quoted in the lecture, including the exceptional “[T. S. Eliot] was worth reading” versus “[T. S. Eliot] is just soft boiled egg shit” – Armitage hinted that it may also have been the case with Arthur Rimbaud, the French Symbolist poet who caused an upheaval in European literature before turning his back on writing to become an unsuccessful businessman in Ethiopia. “You can’t do something forever”, as Dylan states in his “60 Minutes” interview (2004).

Similarities between Rimbaud and Dylan are, Armitage went on to argue, harder to find in the work itself. Asserting that poetry and songwriting, despite requiring similar skills and having “an interwoven history”, are “distinct art forms”, Armitage demonstrated some affinity with Glyn Maxwell: “The other side of everything for songwriters is music. For poets it’s silence, the space, the whiteness” (Maxwell, On Poetry, 2012). Exploring Dylan’s lyrical diction and imagery against poetry’s silent backdrop, he assessed Ricks’s Empsonian reading of “poor” in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (in the context of the song it means both financially and pathetically “poor”), arguing that this seems unlikely when Dylan is “pushing at an open door” elsewhere in the song. In Dylan’s description of William Zantzinger’s “rich wealthy parents”, for instance – is this semantic saturation for emphasis, or, as Armitage suggested, a clumsy tautology? On Dylan’s image of Carroll down “on a whole other level” cleaning out ashtrays, Armitage stated that it “just doesn’t earn its keep” – “on a whole other level” is another example, he says, of Dylan pushing his point unnecessarily – though he conceded that it is overall a strong metaphor. Zantzinger, whose drunken beating of Carroll led to her death, was from a family of wealthy white tobacco farmers; Carroll was a black barmaid.

In his essay “Bob Dylan and the Academy” (2009), Lee Marshall suggests that the problem with much literary criticism on Dylan is that it fails to consider the effect music and the singer’s voice have on the delivery of his lyrics – a track by Dylan must be studied as “a distinctive cultural artefact” rather than “a verbalized poem”. Armitage’s treatment of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” stood up against this claim – the most interesting point in the lecture was his exploration of how music and voice may distort language’s regular metrical patterns. Dylan sings “all tears” and “your face” as trochees, for example, though we would encounter them on the page as iambs. Armitage also pointed out that “Hattie Carroll” is, in fact, a waltz, suggesting the dominating image of the lecture: a “Danse Macabre” of the white white-collar tycoon and the black blue-collar worker he destroyed. This triangular relationship between lyrics, voice and music could fall under the umbrella of conceptual poetry (in which “one does not need to ‘read’ the work as much as think about the idea of the work”, say Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman in Notes on Conceptualisms, 2009) – although Armitage’s argument was against Dylan’s literariness, he may inadvertently have offered a point to the other side.

There are other issues with Dylan’s status as a literary figure, and Armitage did not skip over them. There are, perhaps, other so-called literary songwriters who have simply done it better, such as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell (in particular, Armitage paid homage to the latter’s “Woodstock”, describing it as a “Blakean dream vision piece”); moreover, women in Dylan’s work play “customary roles” – they are, for the most part, stock figures. Armitage rightly suggested that it is hard to reconcile this with Dylan’s ostensibly progressive outlook.

Dylan’s Nobel has been widely regarded, in Armitage’s phrase, as “an agreeable novelty”; this description might also apply to a Professor of Poetry lecture’s focusing largely on music. While it is true that some aspects of Dylan’s writing were conspicuously absent from the discussion (his prose poetry collection Tarantula, 1971, comes to mind), Armitage offered a fair and generous hour’s appraisal, paying appropriate attention to Dylan’s poem “11 Outlined Epitaphs” as an example of writing “unadulterated by a musical score”. The popular subject matter allowed room for his sense of humour, too: responding to Clinton Heylin’s put-down “Simon Armitage: who he?”, he quipped that “a cat can look at a king . . . so meow, Clinton”.

Camille Ralphs is a graduate student at the University of Oxford. Her debut pamphlet, Malkin, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award in 2016.