Of-course Bob Dylan’s work has been analyzed in universities, and at least informally by English teachers in high schools for decades, but on this coming October 4th in Britain (”National Poetry Day”) a definite milestone is going to be reached.

Bob Dylan, acclaimed songwriter and icon of protest for more than 40 years, has finally been embraced by the establishment. For the first time next month his songs will be taught in secondary schools throughout Britain as poetry.

Academics and poets, including the poet laureate Andrew Motion, have welcomed the Dylan education pack, which will be rolled out to mark National Poetry Day. A range of Dylan songs, including I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine, Three Angels and A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, will be available for pupils studying key stages three and four English.

Children will also be asked to write a Dylan-inspired ballad on the theme of dreams, which is the theme of National Poetry Day.

Naturally, not everyone is happy. Sam Leith — who makes it quite clear that he does love Dylan’s songs — writes in The Telegraph:

Some rock and pop lyrics, Dylan’s among them, work as poetry - live differently, but also well, on the page. You’d expect that. Poetry and song - as the two main rhythmic uses of language - have the same origins and much in common.

But that’s not to say they’re the same thing. We share an ancestor with the chimpanzee, and we both like bananas, but we’re not the same creature.

Dylan has minted phrases, lines, entire songs that “work as poetry”. His wordplay is the sort of wordplay you find in poems. His most obviously literary songs are numbered among his most magnificent, Tangled Up In Blue, or Desolation Row: “Ezra Pound and T S Eliot are fighting in the Captain’s tower,” he sings in the latter - Captain presumably Whitman, tower maybe belonging to Yeats.

But the fact that a car and a motorcycle both have spark-plugs does not mean that a motorcycle and a car are the same things. Try stopping the latter at a traffic light without putting your feet down and see where it gets you.

The thing is that poetry - at least as we now talk about it - supplies its own music. The whole score for the experience is there on the page.

Song lyrics work with, and off, and sometimes against, a musical score. English students can very profitably think about the way you use language in the context of music - and I hope the Dylan education pack encourages them to do just that. But they need to recognise that it’s a different game.

This Dylan fan is not particularly incensed at Mr. Leith’s reservations. Yes, Dylan’s lyrics are written as songs, and they are written to be sung, and it’s important not to give short-shrift to what Dylan achieves both melodically and in his performances of the songs. Yet, the songs have strong poetic qualities. Basically, I find this kind of argument doesn’t exercise me the way it might have in the past. (I’m enjoying reading the very lengthy debate in the comments section, however.) Maybe that’s because in 2007 it’s so clear that Dylan is beyond all of this. While his work will always have its detractors, its enormous place in our culture is being recognized more and more each day, and I think that all of this achieved critical mass sometime in the past 10 years. Sam Leith in The Telegraph is not so much concerned that children are merely being presented with Dylan’s songs as an object of study, but rather that the songs are not being characterized properly in the process, and he may have a good point in that.

My own concern would be — naturally — whether introducing Dylan’s songs in a formal way at the secondary school level is going to kill some of the joy that so many kids find in discovering Dylan for themselves. I can well remember the exhilaration I had on hearing Bringing It All Back Home for the first time as a teenager in the 1980s. Would that have been in any way similar if it had instead been introduced in English class? It’s hard to imagine that it would have, although, on the other hand, I was greatly moved by many things that were introduced to me in English class. That’s a conundrum I can’t answer without going back in time. Oh well. Things really have changed.

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