The Nobel Prize committee awarded Bob Dylan with the prize for literature Thursday, which will no doubt prove to be a controversial selection. The issue is not that Dylan is yet another obscure figure the committee named apparently to score political points, nor that he writes in a language little known outside a relatively small community of native speakers. The issue rather is that it’s not clear that the lyrics that Dylan, aka Minnesota’s own Robert Zimmerman, has been writing for more than half a century qualifies in any meaningful way as literature.
Arguing most famously for the affirmative is Boston University professor of English literature Christopher Ricks. One of the world’s top Milton scholars, Ricks has been making the case for Dylan as a great poet for decades. In 2004 he published Dylan’s Visions of Sin, a 400-page volume interpreting a large part of Dylan’s opus. The late Christopher Hitchens reviewed Ricks’ dossier in THE WEEKLY STANDARD and found it unconvincing, though it appears Hitchens objected more to Ricks’ faux folksy style than his claim.
