Bob Dylan Controversy

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While I reviewed strong opinions of both pro and con for the award of the Nobel Prize in literature for Bob Dylan I concluded with my opinion Bob Dylan did not deserve the award because mainly of what literature is. When you look at some of his lyrics it sounds fine during the song but when it is read like a poem it seems very choppy. He Initially did not want to accept the award (“I began to drink. I looked down from the platform and saw a bunch of people who had nothing to do with my kind of politics. I looked down and I got scared. They were supposed to be on my side, but I didn’t feel any connection with them. Here were these people who’d been all involved with the Left in the thirties, and now they were supporting civil-rights drives. …show more content…
The stuff that moved me wasn't the folk stuff that had stories, like "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" or "Blowin' in the Wind" or "Masters of War." But "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was like poetry in the sense that it didn't have a narrative line. What it did was peel that away and leave you with pure emotion. It lifted you up”. But as vice news thinks about the controversy “This not to diminish Dylan’s body of work: His talents are extraordinary, and he deservedly occupies a place of international renown. Bob Dylan is a legend. But he does not deserve a literary prize for his music. This is because songwriting and poetry are entirely different arts, though they share passing similarities — meter, rhythm, rhyme, and the like. In terms of verse, most of Dylan’s work is terrible. But don’t take it from me; here’s Ellen Willis, perhaps the best music critic of her generation, in a 1967 piece on reading Dylan’s songs as …show more content…
But poetry also requires economy, coherence, and discrimination, and Dylan has perpetrated prolix verses, horrendous grammar, tangled phrases, silly metaphors, embarrassing clichés, muddled thought; at times he seems to believe one good image deserves five others, and he relies too much on rhyme. […] His skill at creating character has made good lyrics out of terrible poetry, as in the pre-rock “Ballad in Plain D,” whose portraits of the singer, his girl, and her family redeem lines like: “With unseen consciousness I possessed in my grip/ a magnificent mantelpiece though its heart being
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