The literary world was astonished when the Nobel Prize Committee gave the prize for literature in 2016. Never before had the prestigious award gone to a writer of songs. Dylan was not present at the awards ceremony but wrote a lecture that was released in June 2017.
At the time, I didn’t read it. Probably you didn’t read it either. I can’t quote it in full because of copyright restrictions, but you can find it here. I found it exhilating to read, and I think you will too.
Dylan speaks of the musicians who inspired him, but his main theme is the relationship between literature and music. He writes at length about the books that shaped his values.
He wrote:
When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.
But I had something else as well. I had principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world. And I had had that for a while. Learned it all in grammar school. Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Tale of Two Cities, all the rest – typical grammar school reading that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by. I took all that with me when I started composing lyrics. And the themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally. I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard, and these themes were fundamental.
Specific books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school – I want to tell you about three of them: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.
He then goes into detail about the impact that these three books had on him. You cannot understand his music without reading his passionate emotional attachment to these three books. We will forgive him for saying that he read these books in “grammar school,” as they were customarily taught in high school (if at all).
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t believe Bob Dylan ever went go grammar school.
If he had, he would not have produced these lyrics:
“Lay lady lay, lay across my big brass bed.”
LikeLike
Probably made Joan Baez cringe every time she heard him sing (or say) it.
LikeLike
Amazing…..from Bob Dylan. This will surprise many English teachers. Most students grunted through these required readings, but Bob Dylan’s life cha fed, along will a larger world outside Duluth, Minnesota, in the 1940s & 50s. As teachers, we never know how we touch our students. That’s why we give it OUR ALL! We’re not around to see the fruits of our teaching. We’re OK with that. Diane, thanks for sharing Bob Dylan’s creative journey….especially, the teaching he benefitted from in school. That’s what we live for.
LikeLike
Oops….typos. Hard to type into the tiny and slightly hidden Comment slot. No proofreading allowed!? Anyway, most came through OK. BTW, had to laugh with gusto reading SomeDAM Poet’s comment. I must not have gone to grammar school bc I always loved that song.
LikeLike
I didn’t say I didn’t like the song.
In fact, I have sung it on one than one occasion (to no avail)
LikeLike
Maybe it was my grammar. perhaps I would have scored if I had sung ” lie lady lie, lie across my big futon bed” (I never had a brass bed, big or otherwise and that would have been a real lie if I had claimed as much)
LikeLike
I’ve been listening to him for almost 50 years. As an early adolescent, I was stunned by his lyrics. While I didn’t fully understand them at the time, I did sense that he was singing about the hypocrisy and meretriciousness of American culture. As the man himself put it in “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”:
“For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something they invest in”
I read his memoir, “Chronicles.” For reasons I don’t in retrospect understand, I was surprised to find that he was a superb prose stylist. Thanks for bringing this up, Diane.
LikeLike
Many song writers are actually poets in their own right.
Paul Simon is another superb poet from the same era.
But there are lots of others to this day.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s good the Nobel committee finally recognized this, but that it took them so long is due to little more than snobbery.
LikeLike
The irony is that the first poets were undoubtedly singers — long before humans had even invented writing.
LikeLike
The Lyric Poets
Lyric poets is what we we are
Telling stories from near and far
Where we’re going, whence we came
Storytelling, the human game
LikeLike
Nobel Prize in Lit hauteur
The Noble Prize
In Lit hauteur
Has gone to guys
For sure, for sure
LikeLike
Nearly 90% of the awardees have been men.
But a higher % have been women in recent times.
So maybe the times they are a changin’
LikeLike
SomeDam, I think the ancient epics were originally sung in public performance, weren’t they? Doesn’t The Aeneid begin “Arms and the man I sing”? And yes: yesterday, while driving back here from Schenectady (I’m going to apply for jobs there), Bob Dylan’s cover of “The Boxer” shuffled up on my driving playlist. I like a lot of Paul Simon, for sure.
LikeLike
Bob is my favorite but Leonard Cohen was poetic.
LikeLike
Townes Van Zandt, the best poet Texas ever produced.
LikeLike
And if they have seen fit to add a fake, illegitimate “Nobel” for economics, surely they could add one for a legitimate endeavor like song writing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Don’t follow leaders watch the parking meters…
LikeLike
If reading the classics can produce a Dylan, our young people should be anchored in them as well. My high school was steeped in the classics. While I didn’t appreciate it then, I now understand that the classics helped shape my perspective. I am grateful for having had the opportunity, and I wish all our young people could have that opportunity today. I also wish all members of Congress had read “All Quiet on the Western Front,” maybe they would be less willing to send our young people off to stupid, unwinnable wars and conflicts. We all cannot be artists, but we can learn to appreciate them.
LikeLike
All Quiet on the Eastern Front
All Quiet on the Eastern Front
Determination was short and blunt:
“Conspiracy theory is what it is.
A lab-leak source is simply this!”
LikeLike
The Nobel Prize Lecture
Don’t lecture me
‘Bout life and such
I’ve paid the fee
And way too much!
LikeLike
I can see the history of the whole human race
It’s all right there, it’s carved into your face
Should I break it all down? Should I fall on my knees?
Is there light at the end of the tunnel, can you tell me please?
Stand over there by the cypress tree
Where the Trojan women and children were sold into slavery
Long before the first Crusade
Way back before England or America were made
Step right into the burning hell
Where some of the best-known enemies of mankind dwell…
I wanna bring someone to life, turn back the years
Do it with laughter and do it with tears
LikeLike
I love his music, but the Nobel speech had some striking similarities to Sparknotes, especially the part about Moby Dick. I think an assistant wrote it.
LikeLike
Probably a Dylan groupie.
LikeLike
Dylan could not even be bothered to go to the original ceremony.
He sent Patti Smith instead.
Though I can’t say I blame him
The Nobel prize in Lit hauteur has always been even stuffier than the rest of the prizes.
LikeLike
And that’s pretty stuffy.
If you don’t have a big head before the award, you certainly have one afterward.
Just look at Paul Krugman. His head is so big it’s a wonder his small body will even support it.
LikeLike
And he doesn’t even have a real Nobel Prize.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-economics-nobel-isnt-really-a-nobel/
LikeLike
An assistant did not write it. However he did copy spark notes word for word.
LikeLike
You gotta wonder if he was trying to tell the Nobel committee something.
LikeLike
I love that and hope it is true. I was really having trouble trying to wrap my head around Bob Dylan writing a sweet little paper for the Nobel crowd. Nice of him to put in a word for public schools, though.
LikeLike
What do you love? He copied it and got close to a million dollars for that. Any college kid stooping that low risks getting tossed out of his or her school. Bob got rewarded. ???
LikeLike
Dylan’s Nobel was an award “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”, not payment for a lecture. You have to travel there to meet with them and deliver the lecture in order to accept the award.
This is not a high school kid doing hw. I’ve no doubt the committee selected him in order to break new ground. If they were looking for a stellar literary lecture they would have picked somebody else. What they have instead is a tongue-in-cheek commentary, which was predictable.
LikeLike
Bethree,
Important point you made.
Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for his life’s work, not for the lecture he gave after receiving the award.
LikeLike
No one is arguing the fact he got it for his life work. I’m stating he voluntarily accepted the award and prize money that came with stipulations. If he was going to make a mockery out of a prestigious award he easily could have declined. It’s hypocritical on his part and people make excuses for it because he’s Bob Dylan. If any other person plagiarized their lecture what would happen to them?
The Nobel is an award for academia. We don’t plagiarize in academia as sound practice. Sorry.
Having said that, he is my absolute most favorite lyricist of all time. I’ve seen him well over 100 times in concert and I’ve met and chatted with him multiple times. I adore his work. “Most of the Time”
LikeLike
I said his LECTURE was garbage, not his body of work. News flash: if you don’t deliver the lecture, you don’t receive the money. He was paid for the lecture, not for his literary work throughout the years.
However, you know he plagiarizes in his music/lyrics as well, right?
He should have shared his Oscar with Marty Stuart since he ripped off Marty’s music. But you know… words and music by Bob Dylan.
LikeLike
There is a long tradition of plagiarism in song, especially in the American blues, folk and rock n roll genres.
Sometimes it’s just unadulterated theft, but other times it’s a note of recognition for those who have previously made contributions. And sometimes it’s hard to separate the two.
But plagiarizing Spark Notes is not a nod to Spark. I suspect Dylan was simply fulfilling a requirement to pass the course and pick up his diploma (and prize money) while at the same time mocking the requirement (if not the Prize itself).
LikeLike
Yes absolutely! (Re plagiarism in song) For instance, Hootie and the Blowfish gave a nod to Dylan and Tangled up in Blue but got sued. Bob asked Marty Stuart if he could borrow a part of one of his songs, but copied the entire composition and used it for this game have changed… words and music by Bob Dylan. He wasn’t sued. One is even allowed so many lines of someone else’s work before it’s deemed plagiarized.
Hahaha yes. Agreed again. It wasn’t a nod to Spark. I honestly don’t believe he knows the first thing about how to write a scholarly lecture or academic paper. I don’t think he remembered much about the themes of Moby Dick or what happened, and he wanted to come across as if he did. Soooo he cheated. He could have successfully used Spark Notes to brush up on themes etc presented in the book. He then should have written about these themes in his own words and related it to his writing process or how they inspired his lyrics. He didn’t. He wrote a plagiarized book report/long winded summary of Moby Dick. I, myself, wanted to harpoon that whale after listening to the lecture drag/ramble on for however many minutes it took him to summarize the book. I wanted to stab my eardrums out with the point from a metal compass (math/geometry).
Has anyone checked out his Musicares speech? The first half hour is great then he goes on for the next half hour denigrating people for “not liking his songs.” He actually trashed Merle Haggard. They’ve toured together; Merle had just released an album of Dylan covers, etc. They were friends as well as peers. Well, musicares was the beginning of the end of that relationship.
My point: stop giving this guy a free pass. His songs are wonderful and worthy of high honor, but to excuse his shoddy behavior only perpetuates it.
LikeLike
Unlike you, I haven’t followed Bob Dylan’s career closely. I know he has written some memorable songs. I haven’t read the Spark notes version of Moby Dick, though I’ve read the book twice. It surprised many people in the literary world when he won the Nobel Prize. I enjoyed his lecture for many reasons, mostly because many schools stopped teaching the classics and opt for contemporary literature, much of which is evanescent (one of my grandsons just spent months on a book I never heard of, by an obscure author, that will likely be forgotten in a few years. I like the idea that Dylan/Zimmerman was nourished by the classics.
LikeLike
If you think about it, our ages are an important part of how we view this. Bob has slightly over 3 decades on me. As a kid in school, I was still part of the era where English classes not only taught grammar but we read classical literature. As a teacher, I see the current butchered curriculum that eliminates grammar in the upper grades and has required readings by obscure contemporary authors. ( Also, the profanity and sexual content included in many of these novels would have been inappropriate during my high school tenure.)
Bob is 80 years old and grew up with the classic literature in school. Besides that, he’s an avid reader of literature that predates many of the classics (pre-civil war, obscure poets and authors from other countries many centuries back, etc) as well as contemporary literature. One thing is certain, he is very well read. His choice of literature makes sense given his background. It would have been even more interesting if he picked some of the older obscure works he’s read. They’ve had a major impact on his work since he incorporates lines from them into his lyrics.
Bob is an artist and not a scholar. His artistry does shine in this lecture by the way he delivers it. He doesn’t stand at a podium or on a stage talking about his work and how literature inspires him. Instead he delivers his piece set to a piano softly playing in the background while making me want to mutilate a whale. 😂 He definitely elicits emotion from his listeners. In your case it is enjoyable, and in mine, let’s just say I’m not allowed near any harpoons. 😂 That’s art!!! And he’s fantastic at it.
Perhaps his lecture will compel you or any other casual listener to delve into more of his songs and give them a listen.
LikeLike
Playgiarism
Playgiarism
Sets the tone
Ain’t no schism
Song alone
Every song
Repeats the past
Different gong
But selfsame cast
LikeLike
I find it hilarious that Dylan regularly copies other people’s stuff and violates copyrights, but obviously has zero tolerance when people violate his copyrights.
I regularly play my clarinet along with songs on YouTube and have noticed Dylan apparently has people watching YouTube like a hawk to make sure people don’t post his songs on there. If his songs do make it up, they are quickly taken down and replaced with a copyright violation notice.
Compare that to someone like Neil Young who let’s people post every one of his albums , often in their entirety.
Personally, I actually prefer Neil Young over Bob, because he is a much better guitar player.
LikeLike
Hahahahaha finally someone who acknowledges Bob lack of guitar skills. I cringe when he whips out the guitar to play leads in concert. It is absolutely horrific, to the point that it’s hilarious. All these buffoons in the audience are going wild over it while he’s hitting wrong note after wrong note and sounds like a dying duck.
I actually love his singing. His delivery and timing is impeccable. He doesn’t have a technically good sounding voice with any sort of range. However, like I said, he can deliver it with meaning and emotion. It is an acquired taste for sure.
Funny story. My mom cannot stand Bob. One year she made batches and batches of Christmas cookies to make up trays to give to her friends at work. She asked me to help put together said cookie trays . Reluctantly I did. While helping, she happily blurted, “We should be listening to Christmas music while we do this!!!” Not only do I despise making cookie trays, but I can’t stand Christmas music. However, I whipped out my phone while exclaiming an emphatic sure! I put on Bob’s Christmas from the Heart album and my mother went from this happy, pleasant lady to just plain viscous and combative within a minute of the first song. No more laughing. No more joking. She actually just wanted either my phone to break or me to go home 😂 I’ve never seen someone despise another person’s voice as badly as she despises his. 😆
LikeLike
And better songwriter too.
LikeLike
And better singer too.
LikeLike
Although some might say that when it comes to singing, neither Bob nor Neil can carry a tune.
But I would disagree. Neil can carry a tune. He just carries it differently.
Bob is just not a good singer.
A great songwriter (but not as good as Neil, in my opinion.)
And a mediocre guitar player.
LikeLike
In my opinion, Dylan was a very good singer (and a pretty good guitar player) early in his career. Not a pretty singer, to be sure, but a very good singer with a unique voice and a ton of intensity. But there’s no accounting for taste.
LikeLike
That’s what I’m talking about
LikeLike
Sorry, not my taste. I love the songs of the 1930s and 1940s even the 1950s.
LikeLike
Great conversation on Dylan, thanks for “spark”ing it, Nichole. I agree that generation makes a difference. I have a decade on you, and my lasting impression of Dylan remains his mid-‘60’s body of work, which is all tied up in the spirit of the times. I would probably never have taken a close look at the lyrics had not my sryr hisch Eng teacher encouraged a student fan to share; we studied a few of the songs as poetry.
LikeLike
I was just listening to I Contain Multitudes once more. The speaker of the song is the U.S., I think, and I think the U.S. is Ahab, Ishmael, or a combination of the two. But after reading Dylan’s speech — thank you for posting it — I think maybe the United States is the whale:
You greedy old wolf, I’ll show you my heart
But not all of it, only the hateful parts
I’ll sell you down the river, I’ll put a price on your head
What more can I tell you? I sleep with life and death in the same bed
Get lost, madame, get up off my knee
Keep your mouth away from me
I’ll keep the path open, the path in my mind
I’ll see to it that there’s no love left behind
I’ll play Beethoven’s sonatas, Chopin’s preludes
I contain multitudes
LikeLike
The Great White Whale
A great white whale
Is what we are
A whalers tale
From oceans far
We sank the boats
And drowned the rafts
And nothing floats
But broken crafts
LikeLike
I’d guess that less than 5% of current students will read even two of these books. Which is a good thing because they reproduce colonialism.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Odyssey was written a little before the British Empire got going. Maybe the cyclops represents oppressed cultures, but I doubt it. Moby Dick doesn’t reproduce colonialism either. The way Ishmael thinks of Queequeg, written in the run up to the Civil War, exposes colonialism. Queequeg is clearly the more respected character. It’s a really good book. Not sure what All Quiet on the Western Front has to do with colonialism. It’s a book opposing getting Germany whipped up into a war frenzy. I, for one, don’t have a problem with that.
LikeLike
I think Ponderosa was doing a bit of satire there. “Canon Wars: Social Justice edition.”
LikeLike
Really? I don’t do sarcasm.
Except all the time.
LikeLike
I see Ponderosa’s point: among other things, the Odyssey (together with the Iliad) is about conquest, kidnapping, murder and pillage; Moby Dick is about the same applied to the natural world; and All Quiet on the Western Front is about the inevitable and recurring outcome of such behavior.
It’s Hubris, Ate and Nemesis over and over and over, from our specie’s earliest days to our present, and still an intractable problem. For this reason, these books (and many others) should be required reading, not as instruction manuals but as warnings.
LikeLike
“the Odyssey (together with the Iliad) is about conquest, kidnapping, murder and pillage”
Add rape to the list and you’ve just described Western Syphilization in nutshell.
As a famous politician (whose name escapes me at the moment) wrote, “It takes a pillage”
LikeLike
It Takes a Pillage
It takes a pillage
To raze a village
It takes a rape
To plant a grape
It takes a kill
To conquer a hill
It takes a nation
For syphilization
LikeLike
It takes a rape
To reap a grape”
Might be better
LikeLike
Mark, I see your reasoning. It makes sense. The fact is that there is no time during the last 400 years in which colonialism hasn’t dominated. Thank you for your thoughtfulness.
LikeLike
One frightening thought…whenever Trump was asked which book he read, he’d say “All Quiet on the Western Front”
I actually never thought he read it. He probably had another kid take the test & cheat him out of paying. Luckily, there are not too many Trumps in the world…still too many to ever let up, learn from history, vote, speak up, watch out for our “brothers & sisters”!!!!!
LikeLike
There’s a movie.
LikeLike
Trump the movie?
What’s it rated?
LikeLike
Never heard of a thing called the word you mentioned, unless you’re talking cards. The film about Former President, though, is rated IM for Immature. It also comes with a Gone with the Wind style disclaimer stating that the film “denies the horrors of Former President.”
LikeLike
IMa.
LikeLike
He plagiarized it. He copied spark notes in many parts word for word. An eleventh grade honors student could do a better job. Sorry. Not a fan of his “lecture.” It was a joke.
LikeLike
An eleventh grade honors student could do a better job of plagiarizing?
LikeLike
The Art of Plagiarism
Plagiarism is an art
Changing stuff to not get caught
Using Spark Notes just ain’t smart
Dylan must have not been taught
LikeLike
Let me finish the thought even though you know what I meant. An eleventh grade honor student could do a better job writing a non-plagiarized “book report” about Moby Dick.
LikeLike
Yeah, I know what you meant.
I just couldn’t resist.😀
LikeLike
Lol. 🤪🤪🤪🤪
LikeLike
Bob Dylan rocks! 🙂🔔
LikeLike
Regarding the Odyssey and other ancient stories originating as song, the classic work on this topic is Albert B. Lord’s book The Singer of Tales, Harvard 1960; based on research in the 1930s among Serbocroatian and Bulgarian singers. The following is condensed from the Foreword and one review—-
This book is about Homer, our singer of tales. He represents all singers of tales from time immemorial to the present. Each, even the most mediocre, is part of the tradition. Homer is its most talented representative. There is no equal to Homer, but he who approaches most closely is Avdo Mededovic of Bijelo Polje, Yugoslavia, our present day Balkan Singer of Tales
We believe that the epic singers from the dawn of human consciousness have been a deeply significant group, contributing abundantly to the spiritual and intellectual growth of man. The Homeric poems, Beowulf, the Song of Roland, the epic of Digenis Akritas. and the Yugoslav epics of our own time were all composed orally with the aid of countless formulas. All bards share certain primitive myths and themes. Lord furnishes a working model for the way every oral poem comes to have a written form.
LikeLike