Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize for Literature

Even though it has been almost four years since Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, I cannot resist to take in commentary on this artist who captured much of my listening time as I was finishing high school in the “sixties”.

Eleanor Wachtel of the “Writers and Company” program on the CBC recently revisited  her interview in 2005 with Christospher Ricks.

 On Oct. 13, 2016, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is the first singer-songwriter to receive the honour, and the announcement came as a surprise to many, but Dylan's lyrics have been celebrated by literary scholars for decades. In 2005, Eleanor Wachtel spoke with Christopher Ricks, a professor at Boston University and the author of Dylan's Vision of Sin. In the interview, Ricks explains why he regards Dylan as "the greatest living user of the English language," and compares him to such authors as Tennyson, Milton, Wordsworth, Eliot, and — as he puts it — "that Dylanesque writer, William Shakespeare."1

 Christopher Ricks has written groundbreaking work on Milton, Keats, Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin.

He was described by W.H. Auden as "the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding." Ricks first wrote about Bob Dylan more than 40 years ago, in 1972.

Reference

 1(2016, October 13). Christopher Ricks on why Bob Dylan is "the greatest ... - CBC.ca. Retrieved April 6, 2020, from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/christopher-ricks-on-why-bob-dylan-is-the-greatest-living-user-of-the-english-language-1.3803292