Hey Mr Tambourine man

The times they really are a-changing!

Disagree. A farcical choice. Lyrics are not literature (IMO) and if you think they are where's Sondheim's award?

It's wonderful that the Lit Prize has gone to more obscure writers recently, boosting their careers and canonizing their work. I expect that the Prize will return to doing just that in the years to come. But I see it as first and foremost about excellence, not elevating the underappreciated.

Moreover, the Committee has been awarding it to playwrights for decades now, so it's not like they're only just now straying from strict written word consumption. Not to mention that it's gone to plenty of poets, and poetry's origins are inextricably linked to music and the sung word. Poetry is, simply put, verse.

What brought me around to the idea of Dylan as a poet was Christopher Ricks *Dylan's Visions of Sin*. Ricks is a careful scholar of poetry and the English language and he shows that Dylan's work has the textual and emotional range of the great Anglophone poets. That music is threaded through Dylan's work doesn't make it less poetic (if anything, more so) and it doesn't make it any less literary, any more so than the fact that, say, most of George Bernard Shaw's works were intended to be performed on stage.

Sorry but Sondheim's lyrics is pathetic compared to Dylan's. 
I found it weird the awards went specifically for lyrics though - Dylan writes brilliant prose/books too. 

I have nothing against Dylan who is a fantastic songwriter but, as has been said, song lyrics - including his - are rarely poetry or literature.

If they had given it to Leonard Cohen I would also have been surprised but would have understood it better since he was a poet before being a pop artist and has produced a good number of volumes of critically acclaimed poetry.

The Nobel has over the years made a number of strange awards, presumably to publicise itself. I tend to think this is one of them.

There may well be Dylan songs which work as poetry, excuse my ignorance - and I'm certainly not about to comment on Sondheim about whom I know even less. But it seems to me he operates as a songwriter, in the main, not a poet and there are differences in what consitutes one or the other.

I think the issue here is do song lyrics count as literature or not? The consensus is probably "no", although the Nobel committee may think it is "yes". What many are suggesting is that the committee may have made the wrong decision for this award because what they are giving it (song lyrics which they may think are poetry) for is not what they are supposed to be awarding it for (literature).

That is the conundrum.

Mallardo, Elton doesn't write the lyrics I don't think. Someone called Bernie does.

Poetry isn't just verse.

I'm not that happy in the choice. Nothing against Dylan, love his songs, most of them but can't see him up there with other Nobels.

No,I'm not Parsley.