John Ashbery is 89 years old. He's too old to win. The oldest winner so far was Doris Lessing, who was 87 at the time of the announcement. I don't see them awarding it to anyone older than that or anyone in their 90s. Likewise Donald Hall is 88 years old. Both are older than most reasonably expect a winner to be these days. ... So around 40-87 years old. They fall out of that age range.
Joan Didion is best known as a novelist. She hasn't published a novel since 1996. 20 years ago. After that all of her recent publications are various non-fiction works and collections of essays. None of which seem likely to earn her a Nobel.
Please, list these authors and explain how they've had a bigger literary influence on American society and English language writing, as well as their influence around the world as a whole. Because few if any of them can measure up to the 5+ decades of work that Dylan has provided.
You can't be serious about an age limit. You're saying Lessing is the oldest literature laureate, so before she won the age was lower. So obviously age is not a criterion.
In what quantum universe is Didion best known for her fiction? Everyone knows it is her essays that are best know, especially those in her first two collections,
Slouching Toward Bethlehem and
The White Album. Next in line for best known Didion would be her two memoirs,
The Year of Magical Thinking and
Blue Nights.
Now if you're going to play the influence card in writing about Dylan, then not only are there zero American writers who can compete, but you pretty much have to wipe out most of the other laureates from the beginning. Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, maybe one or two others. That would suggest they should only give out the award every 30 or 40 years. Except that you use the word
literary. I've never understood Dylan's influence to be literary.
And the next time anyone wants to refer to Dylan as a poet, I suggest they go back to the citation and bio portion of the bio-bibliography on the Nobel website where Dylan is clearly portrayed as a song writer and musician. "The great American song tradition," places Dylan in the company of Stephen Foster, Cole Porter, Woddy Guthrie, Willie Nelson and such. That is easy to accept,. The implication that by using techniques learned from modernist and Beat
poets Dylan changed the nature of the
song lyric is interesting and worth exploring. But none of this puts Dylan in the great American poetry tradition of Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, W. S. Merwin and such. The fact that 2 out of 17 members of the Swedish Academy have suggested otherwise convinces me that they are not familiar with American poetry, let alone the broader range of English language poetry. Dylan as a great song writer, no contest. Dylan as a great poet, don't make a fool of him.
