A Poet? Or A Musician?

On October 13 th,2016,the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan,for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” This news causes a mighty uproar very quickly,and Dylan's identities as a musician and a poet become somewhat controversial.Bob Dylan is best known for his identity as a singer-songwriter,who has far-reaching impact on popular music.In fact,he is also a brilliant poet,whose lyrics themselves are very excellent poems.This thesis takes Bob Dylan's lyrics as research subject,with the research methods of induction,textual close reading,and social historical criticism,and discusses the unique features of his poetics.The thesis consists of five chapters,with the third and the fourth chapters as the key and body parts of the thesis,analyzing Bob Dylan's lyrics from the perspectives of “Musicality” and “Poetic Features” and revealing his perfect combination of music and poetry.Many scholars at home and broad have noticed the poetic and literary features in his lyrics,but few of them give a thorough and systematic account of these extremely distinguishing features.Therefore,with the aim of justifying Bob Dylan's identity as a poet and his poetry,the detailed analysis on Dylan's lyrics in term of literary theories is an innovation of the thesis.However,there are also some unavoidable limitations in this thesis.Due to the limited demonstration method,the musicality in Bob Dylan's lyrics such as performance and style are not available for displaying,which prevents the thesis from achieving the comprehensiveness and objectivity.As all Dylan's lyrics exemplified in the study are interpreted by the author,there is unavoidable subjectivity in the outcome of the thesis.