Bob Dylan, Anne Carson, and What We Call Poetry
For the past ten years, I’ve followed the Nobel Prize in Literature less closely than I’ve followed X Factor. I increasingly doubt that art is the point of the exercise, assuming it ever was. The ceremony supplies a verdict so efficiently that reading can start to feel like an optional extra.
I wasn’t planning to write about Anne Carson’s award. Then an excerpt from her poem “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” appeared in my feed, and I remembered the objections to Bob Dylan’s Nobel, announced ten years ago this week. Disliking Dylan’s writing is a defensible critical position. Declaring a songwriter ineligible for literary greatness requires a stranger argument: that something about singing words diminishes their claim upon our attention.
Placed beside Carson’s lines, the opening of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” makes that argument difficult to sustain. The comparison takes us into two passages whose effects we can actually examine, beyond the announcements and the responses they provoke.
What Carson asks us to do
The circulating excerpt begins, “My personal poetry is a failure.” It continues through the wish to cease being a person and the declaration “I want to be unbearable,” before passing into lovers, greenness, and cooling. Taken alone, these lines can look like a series of claims upon our interest, with the connections withheld.
In the complete poem, unbearable experience recurs around attempts to escape the sexual body and the certainty of death. The wish to become unbearable consequently changes direction: the speaker wants to inhabit the condition she has struggled to evade. That recurrence gives the declaration a relation the cropped passage obscures.
Within the excerpt, however, the difficulty remains worth testing. To announce the failure of personal poetry is already to make a personal statement. The speaker tries to write herself out of the category that enables her to speak, and the repeated first-person construction keeps reinstating her. We hear the desire to escape the self becoming another expression of it. There is a real pressure here.
My concerns are with the movement into “the greenness of love.” Green offers freshness, growth, perhaps unripeness; the cooling suggests affection losing heat. Those possibilities are available, but their combination leaves me supplying much of the emotional occasion. The language permits several connections without making any one of them feel especially necessary. A reader may value that suspension. Here, the force of the declaration seems to be more important than the experience that would make it unavoidable.
Carson’s recurring first person gives the passage an intelligible conflict; the uncertainty concerns how fully its later images let us experience it. My dissatisfaction still stands regardless, we need a more exact object than the blanket charge of meaninglessness.
The blade beside the balloon
Dylan begins with an impossible, even biblical, time of day:
Darkness at the break of noon Shadows even the silver spoon The handmade blade, the child’s balloon Eclipses both the sun and moon To understand you know too soon There is no sense in trying
The familiar expectation of daybreak has been displaced into noon, where darkness should have least purchase. Before any social judgment appears, the language has disturbed our ability to orient ourselves. The contradiction is immediately perceptible; we need no explanation of the speaker’s history to feel it.
Then the darkness acts. “Shadows” is a verb, and its objects join things that ordinarily belong to different moral worlds. The silver spoon carries inherited comfort; the handmade blade implies fashioned violence; the child’s balloon brings fragile pleasure.
Their proximity creates a danger beyond the general gloom: a blade beside a balloon makes vulnerability almost physical. Dylan never needs to describe a puncture.
The small word “even” extends the darkness into the apparent protection of privilege. The blade receives no exemption either. Whoever possesses the means to hurt remains inside the same threatened world as the child. From these handheld objects, the stanza widens to the two great sources of light. The movement makes the eclipse feel comprehensive because we have already encountered its reach at an intimate scale.
Sound holds these changes together. Noon, spoon, balloon, moon, soon: the repeated vowel pulls the objects into a common sequence, while the accumulating verbs give that sequence direction.
We can hear the next rhyme coming without knowing which part of existence it will darken. Musical expectation and imaginative uncertainty cooperate.
The final line abandons that rhyme. After five lines of convergence, trying sounds exposed, and the stanza turns from the external world toward the possibility of acting within it. The despair has acquired a setting, a movement, and a sound before it becomes an explicit judgment. That preparation makes the conclusion feel experienced.
For these passages, I prefer Dylan. His images exert more pressure upon one another; the transitions carry me further with less explanatory labor.
Both writers disturb familiar associations, but Dylan makes the disturbance develop across the stanza.
The judgment is about that achieved movement, and it can stand without pretending that six lines settle the value of two careers.
Must poetry leave the song behind?
There is a trap in defending Dylan entirely through the printed page. We can become so anxious to establish his credentials that we treat the music as something the words must survive being stripped of.
A song then passes its literary examination by temporarily ceasing to be a song.
Dylan’s Nobel lecture even distinguishes songs from literature, insisting that they are meant to be sung.
However, his comparison is with Shakespeare’s plays, themselves intended for performance. I take that comparison seriously: duration, stress, repetition, and vocal address help determine what language does to us. A written lyric preserves some of those possibilities and leaves others for the singer.
The opening stanza already makes this audible through its rhymes. Their recurrence organizes anticipation, and delivery can tighten or loosen the interval before the next word fulfills it. Recognizing that musical action strengthens the literary account by explaining how a sequence of words becomes an experience in time. A commonplace phrase can be musically indispensable, and a densely worked stanza can make a poor song. The relation has to be judged in the particular work, through what its words and music enable one another to do.
A serious objection to Dylan’s award concerned the recognition already enjoyed by a famous musician, when less visible writers might benefit more. That argument about distributing attention deserves consideration. It cannot decide the quality of the writing, and it should not be confused with a judgment that songwriting falls outside literature.
Carson’s prize has brought me back to the difference. We are entitled to prefer one passage, to find a celebrated poem insufficiently compelling, and to disagree with the Academy. Those judgments become fruitful when we can identify the word, relation, or movement that earns them. A prize supplies an occasion to read, but don’t expect it to perform the reading for us.
Released on Bringing It All Back Home in 1965, the song had been available for more than fifty years when the Academy rewarded its author.
For me, awarding the Nobel to Dylan remains the boldest and most honest decision the prize has made in at least half a century—perhaps since Camus. It acknowledged that songwriting could produce great poetry under demands and possibilities of its own.
The darkened noon, the blade, and the balloon had already demonstrated that achievement.
Singing them gave us another way to hear it.
Sources
Anne Carson, “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions”, The New Yorker, December 3, 2001 issue. The complete poem supplies the context missing from the circulating excerpt.
Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, official lyrics; originally released on Bringing It All Back Home (1965).
Bob Dylan, Nobel Lecture, June 5, 2017, especially the closing comparison between songs and performed drama.
Bob Dylan, “The Nobel Lecture Now Available”, October 30, 2017; records the award announcement on October 13, 2016.
Reuters, “Canadian writer Anne Carson wins 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature”, October 8, 2026.
PEN America, “Should Bob Dylan Have Won the Nobel Prize for Literature?”, October 14, 2016. Amy King’s contribution supplies the objection about fame and the distribution of literary attention.
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