I opened the article expecting to agree with headline, but after reading it, I think, based just on the one short example it gives, it is wrong.
The first poem that the author points to as a masterpiece is a tortured exercise in formal meter. I had to read it out loud, very deliberately leaning into the meter to hear any musicality. It is difficult not because the feeling communicated are necessarily hard to communicate, but because the author enjoys the puzzle.
The second piece just flowed effortlessly. The rythym and meaning were immediately grasped, in complete silence, while still rewarding someone who sat with it a little longer.
The music is an essential dimension of the text. To remove it and only leave the words is like deciding whether a movie is great based on its screenplay, or taking all the words of a poem and writing it out as prose. The piece that as created to be heard, and of course it won't be good if you remove a whole dimension of it.
The author's argument seems to be "literature equals words," which I, and evidently the Nobel committee, think is a naive way of viewing literature. Music has always been tied to poetry, and the advent of recorded audio made sound people's primary way of experiencing poetry again, as it was before mass literacy. In my opinion, Dylan brought music back to poetry, not poetry to music (which is how many like to characterize his work).
A dozen or more years ago, I opened the Sunday NY Times Book Review, looked at a letter headed "Positively Fourth Rate" and started to laugh. It was written by the composer Ned Rorem to take issue with some books on Dylan comparing his work with the greats of English poetry.
You could look it up, at least if you have an NY Times subscription.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 9.9 ms ] threadThe first poem that the author points to as a masterpiece is a tortured exercise in formal meter. I had to read it out loud, very deliberately leaning into the meter to hear any musicality. It is difficult not because the feeling communicated are necessarily hard to communicate, but because the author enjoys the puzzle.
The second piece just flowed effortlessly. The rythym and meaning were immediately grasped, in complete silence, while still rewarding someone who sat with it a little longer.
The author's argument seems to be "literature equals words," which I, and evidently the Nobel committee, think is a naive way of viewing literature. Music has always been tied to poetry, and the advent of recorded audio made sound people's primary way of experiencing poetry again, as it was before mass literacy. In my opinion, Dylan brought music back to poetry, not poetry to music (which is how many like to characterize his work).
You could look it up, at least if you have an NY Times subscription.