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I have been teaching Bob Dylan all my working life.
Indeed, I sometimes feel I have taught nothing else. I have taught him not just to students but to family, friends, strangers - anyone who will talk to me.
The reason is simple: he is one of the world’s greatest poets.
He has everything a great poet needs. He is prophetic. That is, he speaks the truth to succeeding generations and to all generations. This puts him in the same category as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin and Dylan Thomas. His voice of protest and alarm makes him the Hamlet of our times. I know people who have no other literature in their lives, but they know every line of Dylan’s songs.
He is also one of the greatest of all love poets. At a seminar at Oxford University in the 1970s, I sat listening to a musty don who was saying, “Of course, there has been no truly great English love poetry since the 16th century.” An undergraduate on my right got up and left. I caught up with him later and he said, “Has he never heard of Bob Dylan?” What is so appealing about his love poetry is how raw and honest it is. The “excrucior” of Catullus is never far away.
A poet of many voices
Dylan also has many voices. Some of his voices make him sound like Isaiah or Ezekiel, while others go back to the English ballad tradition. And he has yet another voice, borrowed from Woody Guthrie, which crosses every railway line and backyard in America. He is Rock and Country and sometimes his lyrics are so incomprehensibly obscure it is like listening to James Joyce. His utterances are sometimes Delphic and he is uncompromising about never watering down their complexity; they have that poetic quality that transcends meaning.
I once gave a talk on Bob Dylan and John Keats. Their poetic sensibilities are exactly the same, straining towards Shakespeare’s “fierce dispute betwixt damnation and impassioned clay”. I compared Mr Tambourine Man with Ode to the Nightingale. Dylan follows Keats. However, his song is not a copy but a new original. Dylan himself, I feel, claims kin with Keats in his lyric “Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune”.
Transcending generations
There may be those who say that Dylan does not deserve his laureateship. They will say that he is a parrot or a jackdaw, stealing other writers’ voices and words. Accuse Dylan on this count, then accuse the whole world of art and letters. The King James Bible stole the voice and words of William Tyndale. Shakespeare stole everything.
There are others who will say it is a generational thing: Dylan is for old people. Yet two of the youngest members of my department were rejoicing noisily today when the news was announced.
Besides, Dylan has produced new and great material over seven decades. I do not feel Dylan was ever of my own generation: he was too mysterious and remote. I saw him at the Albert Hall last October and I thought I was watching a reincarnation of Perry Como.
Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize in Literature. This has been a slow train coming, but it is no simple twist of fate.
James Breen is an English teacher at Wellington College
