I think Dylan is a very interesting case. As Catspaw says, he has written an immense amount of crap, maybe more bad stuff in relation to good stuff than anyone except Irving Berlin (which is interesting in itself). He got an idea from Rimbaud and Walt Whitman and the surrealists that constantly writing songs -- at one stage he was writing a couple of hundred every month or two -- was the way to tap your creativity. And don't edit.
If you look at his early songs, almost all of them are marred here and there by cheap rhymes, stream of consciousness that is dreary, "deep" meanings that aren't, and so on. And then there was all that really seriously dreary born again period. And yet, out of that swamp arose 30 or so songs that are really fine works of poetry; and some songs that are going to be around long after we are gone. So in one sense his original strategy was correct, overall.
But the listener is forced to deal with the fact that Dylan is often overrated and underrated in the same album, and sometimes in the same song! I don't know anyone whose work is so variable, in part because of his refusal to edit himself. How to cope with that is a challenge, because a poet like Coleridge, who produced 5 great poems and immense amounts of dreck, is remembered in anthologies and histories as a great poet because all you ever see is the 5 great poems. In Dylan's case the selectivity is taking a lot longer to happen, maybe because of the nature of records vs. books.
Is Dylan the great poet? No. Allan Ginsburg is a greater poet by far (he was being humble that day). But is Dylan a poet. Yes. Did he write great songs. Yes. IMHO. (And something is happening, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones....)yours, Peter T.