Bringin’ the Literature Nobel Back Home

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on October 13, the first time the honor has gone to a musician. Photo courtesy of Xavier Badosa

For baby boomers who as teenagers insisted that the times they were a’changin’ and the young scruffy troubadour singing those words was a wise, prophetic poet with a rare gift, the ultimate vindication came yesterday. It came in the form of the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to Bob Dylan October 13 by the Swedish Academy for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Born Robert Allen Zimmerman, the 75-year-old Minnesota native is the first American to win the literature prize since novelist Toni Morrison in 1993.

Hearing the news in the wee hours Thursday, with inquiries from the overseas press, made the day the “happiest of turmoils all over the world,” says Christopher Ricks, BU’s William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities and the author of several books on Dylan, among them Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Ecco Press, 2003), and an editor of The Lyrics: 1961–2012 (Simon & Schuster, 2014). Ricks says the Nobel is “rightly a tribute to the art even more than to the artist,” a triumph that “like the art itself, will endure.” It is, he says, a triumph of genius.

Ricks has been asked about the relative importance of Dylan’s words versus the music. “Which is more important in water,” he responds, “the oxygen or the hydrogen?”

“A performer of genius, Dylan is necessarily in the business (and the game) of playing his timing against his rhyming,” says Ricks. “The cadences, the voicing, the rhythmical draping and shaping don’t make a song superior to a poem, but they do change the hiding places of its powers. Or rather, they add to the number of its hiding places. I’d not have written a book about Dylan, to stand alongside books on Milton and Keats, Tennyson and T. S. Eliot, if I didn’t think Dylan a genius of, and with, language. But let’s not forget, in the delight of this moment, those other aspects, not strictly literary, of his genius, sharing in the constitution of his art. When Eliot wrote the line “To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,” it was a creation of words. When Dylan sings “condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting,” in “Chimes of Freedom,” he compounds it all, with voice and music joining with words within a different drift and drive.”

A ’60s regular at many now-defunct clubs in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Dylan recorded his first album, Bob Dylan, in 1962 and went on to release 37 studio albums, 58 singles, 11 live albums, 12 recordings comprising The Bootleg Series, and numerous compilation albums, along with the all-star anniversary recordings paying tribute to his vast canon. Joining a stellar list of Nobel literature laureates, including William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, and Gunter Grass, Dylan has also written critically acclaimed films and worked as an actor. His Never Ending Tour, begun in 1988 and still going strong, has taken him to Boston several times in the last few years, most recently this past summer at Blue Hills Bank Pavilion. And there, famous for following his own quirky muse, he performed ballads from the Tin Pan Alley songbook.

“A day doesn’t go by when I don’t listen to Dylan or at least think about him and his art,” says Ricks. “I just think we’re terrifically lucky to be alive at a time when he is.”

“Bob is the equivalent of William Shakespeare,” rock musician and Blood, Sweat & Tears founder Al Kooper once told an interviewer. “What Shakespeare did in his time, Bob does in his time.”

Dylan won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and numbered among his many other honors are 11 Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.

Jeremy Yudkin, a College of Fine Arts professor of music, who along with College of Arts & Sciences Writing Program lecturer Kevin Barents, is teaching a course this semester on Dylan’s music and lyrics, says his “music is woven from folk music, Delta blues, country, Tin Pan Alley, pop, and rock.

“His lyrics echo French Symbolism, Beat poems, British ballads, aching blues, Keats, Browning, and Poe,” says Yudkin. “His voice sounds like Woody Guthrie, Odetta, and Charley Patton.

“And yet he is original. Every great writer and every great songwriter borrows; this one has made songs from which everyone will borrow for generations. He is also an American original. No other country could have produced him. And like all true geniuses, he ‘don’t look back.’ It is often said that he keeps reinventing himself. More important is the fact that he keeps reinventing the music. We should take a moment to remember that all the composers of ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘I Shall Be Released,’ ‘Every Grain of Sand,’ ‘Love Sick,’ ‘Gotta Serve Somebody,’ and ‘Tempest’ are the same man.”

Hear more of Christopher Ricks’ ideas about poetry, song, and Bob Dylan on Thursday, Oct. 20 and Monday, Nov. 14, when the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center will present, as part of its “Conversations with Christopher Ricks,” talks titled “What is the Difference…between Poetry and Song?” and “What is the Difference…between Poetry and Prose?” Free and open to the public, the talks will be in the Richards-Roosevelt Common Room on the first floor of Mugar Library.