Crafty Bob Dylan

Excerpt from above article:

It was Louis Aragon, I think, who said that setting a poem to music was like moving from black and white to color. Aragon, the poet sung by Léo Ferré and others, believed that a poem unsung was half dead.

Well, then, it seems that Dylan was the only one of his era to have been able to embody fully the musicality that is essential to great poetry, the second voice that haunts every poet, but which he generally delegates to those who recite or read him, the power of song that is his ultimate and secret truth and that some have gone mad – literally and tragically mad – trying to pull from cage into canto.

Bard and rhapsodist both. A poetico-musical revolution in one man and one body of work. I like to think that it is this tour de force – this prolonged stroke of genius that is forever young – that the Nobel committee has recognized in its selection.