After Dylan’s Nobel, What Makes a Poet a Poet?

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The Swedish Academy is responsible for awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, and over the past hundred years the group has become renowned for such feats of discernment as denying the prize to Robert Frost, perhaps the most widely read poet of the 20th century, and bestowing the award upon the Swedish writer Erik Axel Karlfeldt, perhaps the most widely read poet in the Karlfeldt family. As has been extensively discussed, the academy’s most recent attempt at literary kingmaking was to deliver the Nobel to Bob Dylan, perhaps the most widely read poet whose work is not, by and large, actually read.

Months after his elevation, the response to Dylan’s prize — and in particular to what it might suggest about the words “literature” and “poetry” — remains mixed. Various Dylan fans continue to be pleased, various English-language novelists continue to be annoyed, and various American poets continue to say something or other that no one is paying much attention to. Beneath the surface of this amusing situation, however, is an intriguing tangle of questions about high and low culture, the nature of poetry, the nature of songwriting, the power of celebrity and the relative authority of different art forms. These questions all largely turn on the notion that Bob Dylan is, if not a poet, at least poet-ish to some notable degree. Indeed, “he is a great poet in the grand English tradition,” according to Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the academy. It’s a theory every poetry critic is familiar with, if only because it often emerges in conversations with the many people who don’t read poetry. “I don’t know much about the things you write about,” one’s airplane seat companion will declare, “but I listen to [insert famous musician] and to me, he/she is a real poet.”

And why not? Lyrics look like poems, or at least a particular kind of poem. They often rhyme. And when we hear the words in a well-delivered song, the experience we have seems to resemble the way we’re often told poems are supposed to feel — like a distillation of overwhelming emotion. Plus, as the academy is quick to note, the ancient Greeks didn’t distinguish between poetry and song. “In a distant past,” Dylan’s citation reads, “all poetry was sung or tunefully recited, poets were rhapsodes, bards, troubadours; ‘lyrics’ comes from ‘lyre.’ ” Given all these points in favor, isn’t it better to expand a word’s definition — “literature” or “poetry” in this case — than to limit it?

Maybe. And yet this line of argument becomes increasingly problematic the further it proceeds. Yes, song lyrics look like poems if you print them on a page. But they’re very rarely printed on a page, at least for the purpose of being read as poems. Mostly they’re printed so that people can figure out what Eddie Vedder is saying in “Yellow Ledbetter.” And for that matter, screenplays and theatrical plays resemble each other more closely than do songs and poems, but that has yet to result in Quentin Tarantino winning the Pulitzer in drama. As for the ancient Greeks, well, the fact that a group of people thought about something a certain way nearly three millenniums ago doesn’t seem like a compelling argument for thinking the same way today. (The ancient Greeks also sacrificed animals to their gods — maybe the Swedish Academy should dispatch a few reindeer, and see if that produces a laureate willing to show up for the ceremony next time around?)

Then there is the music. A well-written song isn’t just a poem with a bunch of notes attached; it’s a unity of verbal and musical elements. In some ways, this makes a lyricist’s job potentially easier than a poet’s, because an attractive tune can rescue even the laziest phrasing. But in other ways, the presence of music makes songwriting harder, because the writer must contend with timbre, rhythm, melody and so forth, each of which presents different constraints on word selection and placement. To pick just one example, lyricists must account for various forms of musical stress beyond the relatively straightforward challenge of poetic meter. In Fleetwood Mac’s otherwise poignant “Dreams,” Stevie Nicks tells us, “When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know,” a line that would be completely fine in a poem. Yet because the second syllable of “washes” falls at a higher pitch and in a position of rhythmic emphasis with respect to the first syllable, Nicks is forced to sing the word as “waSHES.” This kind of mismatch is common in questionable lyric writing; another example occurs at the beginning of Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue,” in which Gramm announces that he has no “REE-grets” (all of them presumably having been eaten by his egrets).

Beyond the many technical differences, though, there is the simple fact that people don’t really think of songs as being poems, or of songwriters as being poets. No one plays an album by Chris Stapleton, or downloads the cast recording of “Hamilton,” or stands in line for a Taylor Swift concert, and says something like, “I can’t wait to listen to these poems!” That’s true no matter how skillful the songs, since competence isn’t how we determine whether a person is participating in a particular activity. We don’t say someone isn’t playing tennis just because she plays less brilliantly than Serena Williams, nor do we say William McGonagall wasn’t a poet just because his poems were terrible. So if Bob Dylan is a poet, it follows that anyone who does basically the same thing that Dylan does should be considered a poet as well. Yet while people routinely describe both Dylan and Kid Rock as “songwriters” and “musicians,” there are very, very few people who refer to Kid Rock as a poet.

That’s because when the word “poetry” is applied to Dylan, it isn’t being used to describe an activity but to bestow an honorific — he gets to be called a poet just as he gets to be a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. This may seem odd, because we don’t typically recognize excellence at one endeavor by labeling it as another, different venture. But poetry has an unusually large and ungrounded metaphoric scope. Most activities exist as both an undertaking (“hammering,” as in hitting something with a hammer) and a potential metaphor tied to the nature of the activity in question (“McGregor is hammering his opponent now!”). But poetry’s metaphoric existence is only loosely tethered to its sponsoring enterprise. When a person says something like, “That jump shot was pure poetry,” the word has nothing to do with the actual practice of reading or writing poems. Rather, the usage implies sublimity, fluidity and technical perfection — you can call anything from a blancmange to a shovel pass “poetry,” and people will get what you’re saying. This isn’t true of opera or badminton or morris dancing, and it can cause confusion about where metaphor ends and reality begins when we talk about “poetry” and “poets.”

Moreover, while most people have limited experience with poems, they do generally have ideas about what a poet should be like. Typically, this involves a figure who resembles — well, Bob Dylan: a countercultural, bookish wanderer who does something involving words, and who is eloquent yet mysterious, wise yet innocent, charismatic yet elusive (and also, perhaps not coincidentally, a white dude). When you join all of these factors — the wide metaphoric scope of “poetry,” the lack of familiarity with actual poetry or poets, the role-playing involved in the popular conception of the poet — it’s not hard to see how you might get a Nobel laureate in literature who doesn’t actually write poems.

Yet if this dynamic explains why people weren’t baffled by Dylan’s Nobel, it doesn’t explain why quite a few poets and English professors wanted him anointed. One would think, after all, poets might be put off by the idea that songwriters can be poet enough to win a prize in literature, when the implied relationship is so clearly a one-way street. (John Ashbery will be waiting a long time for his Grammy.) But in fact, poets have often benefited from the blurred edge of their discipline. Poetry has one primary asset: It’s the only genre automatically considered literary regardless of its quality. Popular songwriting, by contrast, has money, fame and Beyoncé. So there is an implicit trade going on when, for example, Donald Hall includes the lyrics to five Beatles songs in his anthology “The Pleasures of Poetry” (1971). But it isn’t just a straight swap in which song lyrics are granted literariness and poems take on a candle flicker of celebrity. Poetry also benefits in a subtler and more important way, because the implicit suggestion of these inclusions is that only the very best songwriters get to share space with poets. Poetry’s piggy bank may remain empty, but its cultural status is enhanced — in a way that is hugely flattering to poets and teachers of poetry, even as it is insulting to brilliant songwriters who happen to be less famous than, say, the Beatles.

Which is what makes this a risky game for poets. Culture is less a series of peaceable, adjacent neighborhoods, each inhabited by different art forms, than a jungle in which various animals claim whatever territory is there for the taking. It’s possible that poets can trail along foxlike behind the massive tiger of popular music, occasionally plucking a few choice hairs from its coat both to demonstrate their superiority and to make themselves look a bit tigerish. With Dylan’s Nobel, we saw what happens when the big cat turns around.