Bob Dylan's lyrics cited in Nobel honor; praised as 'poetry for the ear'

Bob Dylan, shown in 2012, rarely gives interviews and had no comment Thursday on his Nobel Prize in literature.
Bob Dylan, shown in 2012, rarely gives interviews and had no comment Thursday on his Nobel Prize in literature.

NEW YORK -- Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for work that the Swedish Academy described as "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

He is the first American to win the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993 and the first literature laureate whose career has primarily been as a musician.

This is the second year in a row that the academy has turned away from fiction writers for the literature prize.

The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, made the announcement in Stockholm. In a televised interview afterward, Danius said that Dylan "embodies the tradition. And for 54 years, he's been at it, reinventing himself, creating a new identity." She suggested that people unfamiliar with his work start with Blonde on Blonde, his album from 1966.

[PLAYLIST: 15 of the best Dylan songs]

"Bob Dylan writes poetry for the ear," she said. "But it's perfectly fine to read his works as poetry."

She drew parallels between Dylan's work and poets as far back as Greek antiquity.

"It's an extraordinary example of his brilliant way of rhyming and his pictorial thinking," Danius said. "If you look back, far back, you discover Homer and Sappho, and they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to. They were meant to be performed. It's the same way with Bob Dylan. But we still read Homer and Sappho. He can be read and should be read. He is a great poet in the grand English tradition. I know the music, and I've started to appreciate him much more now. Today, I'm a lover of Bob Dylan."

The prize awards Dylan a gold medal and a check for about $925,000.

Dylan rarely gives interviews, and a representative said the star had no immediate comment. He is on tour and was scheduled to play in Las Vegas.

Tributes for Dylan -- as well as the Nobel's unconventional choice -- came from across the world and spanned from the worlds of politics to letters.

"Congratulations to one of my favorite poets, Bob Dylan, on a well-deserved Nobel," tweeted President Barack Obama, who in 2012 presented the singer-songwriter with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

"Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice," said a Twitter message from British novelist Salman Rushdie. Chile's president, Michelle Bachelet, called the honor for Dylan a "joy" and recalled "many fond memories from my adolescence are associated with his music."

"The chatter is this pride and that finally he gets recognized in this way that equates songwriting with great literature," said songwriter Rosanne Cash, whose late father, Johnny Cash, was a friend and sometime collaborator with Dylan. "I can't tell you how many times people have said to me, because I also write prose, 'Oh, you're also a real writer.' It's so offensive. Like songwriting doesn't require the same discipline. So the fact that he's recognized lifts all of our boats."

But at least one prominent writer, however, took issue with the Nobel selection. Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, decried it as "an ill-conceived nostalgia award" made for "senile, gibbering hippies."

In choosing a popular musician for one of the most coveted prizes in the literary world, the Swedish Academy dramatically redefined the boundaries of literature, setting off a debate about whether song lyrics have the same artistic value as poetry or novels.

"Most song lyrics don't really hold up without the music, and they aren't supposed to," poet Billy Collins said. "Bob Dylan is in the 2 percent club of songwriters whose lyrics are interesting on the page, even without the harmonica and the guitar and his very distinctive voice. I think he does qualify as poetry."

"The old categories of high and low art, they've been collapsing for a long time," said David Hajdu, a music critic for The Nation who has written extensively about Dylan and his contemporaries, "but this is it being made official."

Dylan, the son of a Minnesota appliance-store owner, began as a folk singer but soon established himself as one of the voices of political protest and cultural reshaping in the 1960s.

Dylan's songs often are seen as dense prose poems packed with flamboyant, surreal images. Rolling Stone magazine once called him "the most influential American musician rock and roll has ever produced."

He first gained notice with ringing protest songs that served as anthems for the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements with such songs as "Masters of War," "The Times They Are a-Changin'," and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."

Dylan sang at the 1963 March on Washington, the civil-rights procession presided over by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

In February 2010, Dylan took the stage at the White House for a concert honoring the music from the 1960s civil-rights movement. Backed by only a piano, he performed an acoustic rendition of "The Times They Are a-Changin'" as Obama watched from the front row.

"Things were changing all the time and a certain song needed to be written," Dylan said in 1965. "I started writing them because I wanted to sing them. ... One thing led to another and I just kept on writing my own songs."

Information for this article was contributed by Ron Charles, Geoff Edgers, Brian Murphy and J. Freedom du Lac of The Washington Post; by Ben Sisario, Alexandra Alter, Sewell Chan and Alexandra Alter of The New York Times; by Hillel Italie; Karl Ritter and staff members of The Associated Press.

A Section on 10/14/2016

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