2008 The Pulitzer is America’s oldest and most prestigious prize for literature, art and music. On 9 April 2008, Bob Dylan joined Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow as one of its laureates. The award drew even more attention than for those eminent writers. He had, newspapers declared, ‘made music history by becoming the first rock musician to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize’.
But Dylan was not, of course, merely a rock star. He was a great writer. The point was made by the Pulitzer Prize administrator, Sig Gissler: ‘this award reflects the efforts of the Pulitzer board to broaden the scope of the music prize, and encompass the full range of excellence in American music. It also recognises Mr Dylan’s lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.’ The lyre, of course, is the instrumental ancestor of the guitar. Possibly Homer accompanied himself on one.
That Robert Zimmerman regarded himself as primarily a poet is evident from the name he adopted as a public performer, taken from the Welsh bard, Dylan Thomas. The public recognition of Bob Dylan as a major poet can be credited to the efforts of one of the leading literary critics of the 20th century, Christopher Ricks.
As early as the 1960s, Ricks was making the point on the BBC’s Third Programme. It was then widely seen as a mild donnish eccentricity, or perhaps an ill-advised attempt to play Professor Trendhound. Over the years, as his albums went multiple platinum, Ricks continued to give Dylan respectful attention, and critical respect for Dylan as a literary troubadour for his age grew proportionally.
In 2004, Ricks published a 500-page exegetical work, Dylan’s Vision of Sin, which placed the singer’s lyrics within large theological and literary frameworks. Dylan’s lyrics, Ricks insisted (as he had been insisting for 40 years), ‘have entered the realm of the enduring’. He was, Ricks said (in interviews promoting his 2004 book), ‘on the same level as Milton, Keats and Tennyson’ (on all of whom Ricks had written authoritative monographs).
Dylan was not, Ricks maintained, ‘an obscene howling hobo’, as some would like to see him: ‘a lot of his songs are full of intelligent witty resourceful references to people like Verlaine and Rimbaud, and to Shakespeare and to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. I don’t know why people think that he doesn’t know anything about those people.’
Ricks’s Dylanology was, plausibly, responsible for the singer’s being awarded an honorary doctorate in 2004 from St Andrews University, and the Pulitzer four years later. Who knows, perhaps the Nobel is in the future. If so, Ricks should be on the podium in Stockholm as well.
Oddly, it seems that Dylan and his most eminent exegeticist met only once, in 1999. As Ricks recalled in an interview:
Five years ago he played a concert here at [Boston] university and I had no hand in arranging it; I was told about it rather late and could have killed the organizers. Shortly before the concert I received word to come backstage, so my wife and I went half an hour before the show. And Dylan said: ‘Mr Ricks, we meet at last.’ My reply was: ‘Have you read any good books lately?’
They went on to discuss Shakespeare’s Richard III.