Half a century ago, Bob Dylan shocked the music world by plugging in an electric guitar and alienating folk purists. For decades he continued to confound expectations, selling millions of records with dense, enigmatic songwriting.
Now, Dylan, the poet laureate of the rock era, has been rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor that elevates him into the company of T.S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison and Samuel Beckett.
Dylan, 75, is the first musician to win the award, and his selection Thursday is perhaps the most radical choice in a history stretching back to 1901. In choosing a popular musician for the literary world’s highest honor, the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, dramatically redefined the boundaries of literature, setting off a debate about whether song lyrics have the same artistic value as poetry or novels.
Some prominent writers celebrated Dylan’s literary achievements, including Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie, who called Dylan “the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition,” adding, “Great choice.”
But others called the academy’s decision misguided and questioned whether songwriting, however brilliant, rises to the level of literature.
“Bob Dylan winning a Nobel in Literature is like Mrs. Fields being awarded 3 Michelin stars,” novelist Rabih Alameddine wrote on Twitter. “This is almost as silly as Winston Churchill.”
Many musicians praised the choice with a kind of awe. On Twitter, Rosanne Cash, the songwriter and daughter of Johnny Cash, wrote simply: “Holy mother of god. Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize.”
But some commentators bristled. Two youth-oriented websites, Pitchfork and Vice, both ran columns questioning whether Dylan was an appropriate choice for the Nobel.
As the writer of classics of folk and protest songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” as well as Top 10 hits including “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan is an unusual Nobel winner. The first American to win the prize since Morrison in 1993, he is studied by Oxford dons and beloved by presidents.
Yet instead of appearing at the standard staid news conference arranged by a publisher, Dylan was in Las Vegas on Thursday for a performance at a theater there. By late afternoon, Dylan had not commented on the honor.
Dylan has often sprinkled literary allusions into his music and cited the influence of poetry on his lyrics, and has referenced Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Ezra Pound. He has also published poetry and prose, including his 1971 collection, “Tarantula,” and “Chronicles: Volume One,” a memoir published in 2004. His collected lyrics from 1961-2012 are due out on Nov. 1 from Simon &Schuster.
Literary scholars have long debated whether Dylan’s lyrics can stand on their own as poetry, and an astonishing volume of academic work has been devoted to parsing his music. The Oxford Book of American Poetry included his song “Desolation Row,” in its 2006 edition, and Cambridge University Press released “The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan” in 2009, further cementing his reputation as a brilliant literary stylist.
Billy Collins, the former U.S. poet laureate, argued that Dylan deserved to be recognized not merely as a songwriter, but as a poet.
“Most song lyrics don’t really hold up without the music, and they aren’t supposed to,” Collins said in an interview. “Bob Dylan is in the 2 percent club of songwriters whose lyrics are interesting on the page even without the harmonica and the guitar and his very distinctive voice. I think he does qualify as poetry.”
In giving the literature prize to Dylan, the Nobel committee may also be recognizing that the gap has closed between high art and more commercial creative forms.
“It’s literature, but it’s music, it’s performance, it’s art, it’s also highly commercial,” said David Hajdu, a music critic for The Nation who has written extensively about Dylan and his contemporaries. “The old categories of high and low art, they’ve been collapsing for a long time, but this is it being made official.”