Oct 15, 2016 4 min read

The stubborn faction of theorists and sleuths who believe that William Shakespeare did not write the plays that bear his name frequently suggest that works of such discernment and grace could not have possibly come from the pen of someone born in a provincial backwater like Stratford-upon-Avon, England. It must have been someone cut from a more cosmopolitan cloth, they say, who crafted “King Lear,” “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “Othello,” “Richard III” and the 33 other plays that endure more than four centuries after they were first staged.

But genius isn’t restricted to those who hail from worldly, cultivated outposts. To cite an example from more recent times, consider Bob Dylan.

Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing, Minn., in 1941. His father was the proprietor of an appliance store. Hibbing is in Minnesota’s Iron Range, a full 200 miles from Minneapolis and a hop, skip and a jump from the chill of Lake Superior. Who would have ever imagined that someone who has had such an abiding and broad-based impact on our culture could have been nurtured at such an undistinguished crossroads?

The comparison to Shakespeare is not inapt. The late former Beatle George Harrison once quipped that Dylan made Shakespeare look like Billy Joel, and lines from Dylan songs have weaved their way into everyday discourse with about as much frequency as the Bible or the Bard: “The times they are a-changin;'” “He not busy being born is busy dying;” “Money doesn’t talk, it swears;” “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows;” “Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked;” “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose”; and on and on. Other artists have sold more records over the years – Celine Dion has shifted twice as many units – but few outside the Beatles have been as important as Dylan.

In a career that has spanned more than a half-century, Dylan has won Grammys, an Oscar, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Pulitzer Prize, been inducted into the French Legion of Honor and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and has been feted at the Kennedy Center. On Thursday, Dylan received perhaps the weightiest and most controversial accolade of his career – a Nobel Prize in literature.

Why, more than a few observers wondered, would you give the medal to someone whose written work primarily consists of songs and not novels, essays or poetry. But Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel prizes, said that Dylan “writes poetry for the ear” and compared him to Homer and Sappho, who “wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to. They were meant to be performed. He can be read and should be read. He is a great poet in the grand English tradition.”

Dwight Garner, a book critic for The New York Times, argued that Dylan should be looked at outside the narrow realm of music: “This Nobel acknowledges what we’ve long sensed to be true: that Dylan is among the most authentic voices America has produced, a maker of images as audacious and resonant as anything in Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson.”

Back in the mid-1960s, when his hair was wild, he wore dark sunglasses and wielded a howling electric guitar, the prospect of Dylan winning a Nobel Prize in literature would have seemed unlikely. Back then, in Dylan’s own words, he was perceived by many as “the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese.”

Now, Dylan joins a pantheon that includes Bertrand Russell, William Faulkner, William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw. It’s a realm where he belongs.