Well Woody wrote simple words for simple people to understand, with devastating clarity and lyricism, no less poetic for that. He avoided cleverness, obscurantism and appeals to a weird in-crowd that find strange arrangements of words just as perplexing as me yet who pretend to understand them "deeply."

Poetry is about crystal-clear communication of ideas that we non-poets find inchoate, giving us that revelatory spark of sudden comprehension. Poets reach out to grab us by the throat, and the last thing they want is for us to be surrounded by perplexity and fog that they might have induced. Dylan fails abysmally on that count alone. If you want your literature to be something that you have to scratch your head over, Dylan may be for you. The art I like most is the art that reaches out to me, not the art that tries to confuse me via impenetrable language and to make me feel that I'm not in the in-crowd, thank you. And I'm not illiterate, and I do make the effort. Woody lives, but not through Bob Dylan.