'He's a historical magician': Two professors on why Bob Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize

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Bob Dylan’s lengthy career is difficult to sum up. The restless and prolific innovator has sold more than 100 million albums, won Grammys, Golden Globes and Oscars and is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Check out highlights of his legendary life. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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Political folk singer Joan Baez was a highly influential collaborator with Dylan in his early career. They’re pictured performing during the March on Washington civil rights rally on Aug. 28, 1963. (Rowland Scherman / Getty Images)

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After recovering from a near-fatal 1966 motorcycle crash, Dylan regrouped, playing with a backing band soon to be known as the Band. Eschewing touring, they instead recorded dozens of songs in widely bootlegged sessions later known as “The Basement Tapes.” They are shown performing Jan. 20, 1968, in New York City’s Carnegie Hall. (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

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Bob Dylan appears in a film still for “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” (for which he also did the soundtrack) which was released in May 1973 and filmed in Durango, Mexico.

(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

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In 1988, Dylan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. After the ceremony, he performed with the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, right. (Vince Compagnone / Los Angeles Times)

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Bob Dylan performs at the John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia during the first international live aid concert against hunger in Africa on July 13, 1985.

(Micelotta Frank / AFP/Getty Images)

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In 1994, Dylan performed at the 25th anniversary of Woodstock in upstate New York. He had rejected an invitation to play at the original 1969 fest, choosing instead to appear at the Isle of Wight festival in England on Aug. 31, 1969. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

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Dylan performed one of his best-known songs, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” in front of Pope John Paul II in Bologna, Italy on Sept. 27, 1997, before an estimated crowd of 300,000 (Luca Bruno / AP)

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While performing the song “Love Sick” at the 1998 Grammys, Dylan was interrupted by performance artist Michael Portnoy, with the words “Soy Bomb” painted on his chest. (Mark Lennihan / AP)

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Dylan has been married twice and has six children. His son Jakob Dylan, center, is the lead singer for the rock band the Wallflowers and a solo artist. (Patrick Downs / Los Angeles Times)

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In 2002, Dylan returned to the Newport Folk Festival for the first time since 1965, when he had famously shocked fans by strapping on an electric guitar. (Michael Dwyer / AP)

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In 2006, director Todd Haynes released the film “I’m Not There,” in which different actors -- including Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett, pictured -- play incarnations of Dylan at various phases of his public and private life. (Jonathan Wenk / AP)

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Willie Nelson, right, and Dylan performed together at Willie Nelson and Friends’ “Outlaws and Angels” concert at the Wiltern in Los Angeles on May 5, 2004. (Lori Shepler / Los Angeles Times)

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President Barack Obama, background, presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bob Dylan on May 29, 2012.

(Mandel Ngan / AFP/Getty Images)

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Dylan -- seen at Les Vieilles Charrues Festival in Carhaix, France, in December 2013 -- continues to perform on what’s been dubbed “The Never Ending Tour.” (David Vincent / AP)

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Among the many recent tributes inspired by Dylan was 2014’s album “Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes.” Participants included Jim James, left, Rhiannon Giddens, Marcus Mumford, Taylor Goldsmith and Elvis Costello. (Drew Gurian / Invision / AP)

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Dylan was honored at the MusiCares 2015 Person of the Year Gala on Feb. 6, 2015, where he delivered a lengthy speech about songwriting and musical inspiration. (Frazer Harrison / Getty Images)

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People look at books by Bob Dylan who was announced the laureate of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 13, 2016.

(Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP/Getty Images)

By Mikael Wood

Oct. 13, 2016 1:05 PM PT

Princeton University professor Sean Wilentz has never had any trouble seeing Bob Dylan as a crucial literary figure.

“He’s a historical magician — a writer who’s capable of creating this zone where it’s 1935 and 1835 and right now and tomorrow,” said Wilentz. “That’s his genius.”

But the author of “Bob Dylan in America” concedes that not everyone in the academic establishment has always viewed the 75-year-old songwriter that way.

“Because he comes from the world of popular music, there’s been some hesitation,” Wilentz said. “In some circles, he had to be legitimized.”

How’s this for legitimate? On Thursday, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” as the Swedish organization responsible for the award put it. Previous winners include Doris Lessing, Günter Grass and Toni Morrison.

Dylan’s selection triggered immediate reaction online, including some from writers who expressed disapproval.

On Twitter, “Gods Without Men” author Hari Kunzru called it “the lamest Nobel win since they gave it to Obama for not being Bush,” while Irvine Welsh (of “Trainspotting” fame) wrote, “I’m a Dylan fan, but this is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.”

Yet Kevin Dettmar, chair of the English department at Pomona College, said the Nobel committee got it right — or close to it.

“ ‘Poetic expressions’ suggests local incidents of great lines,” Dettmar said. “I’d say ‘poetic expression.’ What Dylan has done is evolve a new idiom for pop music — intelligent, playful, introspective — that draws on poetry to do the work it does.

“It was brave of them to think that way about it.”

Dettmar, editor of “The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan,” acknowledged that literary types have resisted recognizing the songwriter’s work as poetry because “so much of its effectiveness is in his phrasing.”

“The internal rhyme, the assonance, the consonance — you can see all that on the page,” Dettmar added. “But it’s the way he emphasizes surprising syllables, the way he almost overplays it, that creates this emotional urgency that you really have to hear.”

Still, Wilentz said the publication in 2004 of Dylan’s widely acclaimed book “Chronicles: Volume One” — which he called “one of the great American memoirs” — went some way toward “enhancing his literary bona fides.”

Dettmar agreed, commending Dylan’s “strong allusive voice” that transcended the confessional quality many associate with pop and rock songwriting.

“It’s hard to figure out where Dylan is in the book — or where Robert Zimmerman is,” Dettmar said, using Dylan’s given name. “He’s playing possum all the way through.”

Wilentz also pointed to “Dylan’s Visions of Sin,” a weighty exegesis by British literary scholar Christopher Ricks, as a driver of the star’s growing recognition as an important arranger of words.

As much as he admires Ricks’ book, though, Wilentz insisted that Dylan needn’t be separated from his music to deserve the Nobel.

“Lyric poetry has to be judged as its own form,” he said. “I think it stands up on the page. But why should literature be confined to that?”

Twitter: @mikaelwood

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