Bob Dylan rocks, but as a poet he is just bland on bland
Illustration: Eric Lobbecke
· Luke Slattery
· The Australian
· 12:00AM October 18, 2016
Poets around the world have every reason to scorn Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature. There are sinecures aplenty in the poetry world, but not a lot of money — still less fame. Dylan has fame and money in abundance. He didn’t need the Nobel. And he didn’t deserve it.
There’s a distinctly rhapsodic, cryptic quality to Dylan’s poetically charged lyrics. Right from the get-go he saw himself as a balladeer and poet. He invokes Shakespeare “in the alley” (Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again), Verlaine and Rimbaud (You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go); and in a 1978 interview he declared himself “a poet first and a musician second”. He’s widely read in the literary canon, though unschooled in it. He once nominated Henry (Tropic of Cancer) Miller as “the greatest American writer”. Few critics, let alone readers, would agree with that call today.
Dylan’s verses, when separated from the music, the whiny yet strident voice (it was Bowie who likened its timbre to “sand and glue”), and the carefully curated mystique, don’t possess the largeness of spirit and the formal ambition that I expect of great art. And isn’t the Nobel meant to be about greatness?
The Swedish academy awarded the laurel to Dylan, now 75, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. So when did these innovations take place? Short answer: around 1965.
It was around this time that Dylan made his controversial transition from folk hero to rock god. His most dynamic artistic phase was the mid-1960s when albums like Bringing it all Back Home (an electric acoustic split), Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde rolled off the production line in quick succession. There have been good albums since his salad days — Time out of Mind (1997) was a well-received late bloomer. But I doubt they would have been noticed if Robert Zimmerman wasn’t already Dylan, and the forging of that artistic persona took place around 50 years ago.
In justifying the award to Dylan the Swedish academy said: “If you look far back, 2500 years or so, you discover Homer and Sappho. They wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to and performed, often together with instruments, and it’s the same way for Bob Dylan.”
Well, yes — and no. Greek lyric poems, as the term suggests, were accompanied by a lyre. Epics were read and transmitted orally. But it’s also true that for the past 2000 years or more Sappho and Homer have been enjoyed without the company of instruments or performers — as bare words on a page.
Stripping Dylan’s lyrics of their musical adornments, in contrast, tends to diminish them.
Scan the unadorned words of Lay Lady Lay, one of Dylan’s greatest hits, and you just think: “Really?” “Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed/ Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile/Until the break of day, let me see you make him smile/ His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean/And you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen.”
Dylan has penned some memorable lines and some great songs, in the folk-rock tradition. But great literature? I don’t think so.
Others disagree. In Dylan’s Visions of Sin the British literary scholar Christopher Ricks made some preposterous claims about Dylan’s literary sensibility. These include an assertion that Not Dark Yet, from Time out of Mind, is a riff on, or memory of, John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale.
Ricks’s idea of sound evidence is that Dylan’s opening verse of 50 words echoes at certain points Keats’s poem of 600. It’s a kind of contorted pretzel logic that forces him to consider Dylan’s “too hot” (as in temperature) as a synonym for Keats’ “too happy” (a state of mind).
This piece of academic casuistry merely succeeds in revealing what an infinitely finer and more appealing poet is Keats.
In my late teens I used to swoon over the lyrics to Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, the storehouse of his finest love songs. But I recently re-read the signature song of that album as if it were poetry, just black type on white background.
The song begins: “Early one morning the sun was shining/I was laying in bed/Wondering if she’d changed at all/If her hair was still red.” The only outstanding thing about these lines, which offer us the cringe-worthy image of a flame-haired lover simply to rhyme with “bed”, is their trundling banality.
They read on the page like slick narrative verse with a Beat flavour — nothing more.
Then there are the celebrated lyrics of Like a Rolling Stone, anointed by Rolling Stone magazine, which took its name from the song, as Dylan’s undisputed masterpiece and the greatest ever work of pop music.
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People call say ‘beware doll, you’re bound to fall’
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal
There’s nothing poetically innovative about this song from Dylan’s folk-rock transition period: it relies heavily on a basic rhyme structure repeated in each of the four verses.
The allusions are inventive, varied, and, perhaps more than anything, intriguing. The work is written in a private code that has never been cracked, which adds to its allure.
On the other hand the song is really little more than a piece of sustained vituperation — a slapdown, a payback, an act of revenge. “Miss Lonely”, the poet’s target, was once wealthy — “a princess on a steeple” — and is now homeless, bereft, and desperate.
The exultant poet delights in her misfortune; her fall. Am I wrong to detect notes of narcissism — of misogyny — in the greatest of all pop songs? Dylan has explained how the lyrics began as a long piece of “vomit”. It seems to have then been distilled into a short piece of vomit.
The music, the driving rock rhythm and surging organ riff — transports Like a Rolling Stone into a brilliant piece of popular art; though not, I think, a work of enduring literature.