Did Bob Dylan deserve the literary Nobel Prize?

A few years back, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature. This came as a surprise to many seeing how the award appears based on his song lyrics that “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

I, for one, gave pause and rubbed my chin. I have no issue with Dylan getting the award as some of my other author friends. His lyrics are poetical and speak to the human condition in pointed folkish terms. Raw emotion flows through them and exemplary poetry cannot be created without it. That, of course, is why an AI engine will never create true poetry. AI engines can never experience emotions and therefore never be truly sentient.

There are certainly others more deserving musicians than Dylan, however, for a Nobel Prize in literature. In the music field alone Robert Smith of The Cure penned a much greater body of work that towers over that of Dylan’s. Smith is still writing at the age of 67.

In terms of volume (not that sheer number has anything to do with literary merit), Dylan has written around 375 songs. Robert Smith has given us around 165 with The Cure and his various side projects. Dylan has more than doubled his output to date. Many times Dylan clings to didactic poetical methods in his songs by delivering a moral. Sigh. His preachy songs include "Trust Yourself" and "The Times, They are a Changing." There is nothing didactic in hardly any song by Robert Smith. He tells it like it is and leaves moral implications to the reader as any good poet should. A host of Dylan songs are junior-highish in their over-handedness and chintz rhyming doggerel.

Consider these lines from "Hurricane" (1976): “How can the life of such a man Be in the palm of some fool’s hand? To see him obviously framed Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed To live in a land Where justice is a game”

Compare the deep image lyrics of one of Robert Smith's "The Same Deep Water" off the Disintegration album:

Kiss me goodby Pushing out before I sleep

Can't you see I try

Swimming the same deep water as you is hard

The shallow drowned lose less than we You breathe the strangest twist upon your lips

And we shall be together And we shall be together Kiss me goodbye Bow your head and join with me

And face pushed deep reflections meet The strangest twist upon your lips

And disappear the ripples clear

And laughing break against your feet And laughing break the mirror sweet So we shall be together

So we shall be together

Kiss me goodbye pushing out before I sleep It's lower now and slower now

The strangest twist upon your lips

But I don't see and I don't feel

But tightly hold up silently My hands before my fading eyes

And in my eyes your smile The very last thing before I go The very last thing before I go

The very last thing before I go I will kiss you, I will kiss you I will kiss you forever on nights like this I will kiss you, I will kiss you

And we shall be together

A number of critics cite "Forever Young" as the finest of Dylan's lyrics. Do you feel there is a certain tongue-in-cheek plonk being delivered here? Do these sound like the wish of a mother as her child leaves the house for the last time?

May your hands always be busy

May your feet always be swift

May you have a strong foundation

When the winds of changes shift

May your heart always be joyful May your song always be sung

And may you stay forever young

Dylan speaks of his “rolling stone.” Robert Smith also addresses the physical world in "The Hanging Garden" where he again delights our Gothic sensibilities:

Creatures kissing in the rain

Shapeless in the dark again In the hanging garden please don't speak In the hanging garden no one sleeps

Catching halos on the moon

Gives my hands the shapes of angels

In the heat of the night the animals scream

In the heat of the night walking into a dream

Fall fall fall fall Into the walls

Jump jump out of time

Fall fall fall fall

Out of the sky

Cover my face as the animals cry In the hanging garden

Creatures kissing in the rain

Shapeless in the dark again In the hanging garden change the past In the hanging garden wearing furs and masks

Fall fall fall fall Into the walls Jump jump out of time

Fall fall fall fall

Out of the sky

Cover my face as the animals die

In the hanging garden In the hanging garden

There is little comparison between the two poets and the world should take notice. Bob Dylan's overriding limitation as a poet is that the New York School of thought is tied to him like an anchor and its is pulling him under the Same Deep Water, to coin part of a Smith title.

Robert Smith's poetry rarely knows time or place, and has no limitations on its depth; for that it should live forever.

AndrewBarger.com

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