In the weeks since Alice Munro’s death, I’ve been thinking about this paradox: While she won the Nobel Prize and the highest respect of reviewers, she never won the hearts of the mass market audience. Why? Hmmm . . . should we start by thinking about the reasons we are … Read More
Tag: Nobel Prize for Literature
“It should not simplify.”
Up and down and up again – the changes in the temperature this spring have caught me off balance more than once. Uncertain times call for poetry, I think, and for contemplating the purpose of poetry. Seamus Heaney’s book The Redress of Poetry shows how poetry should repair or … Read More
“The secret of all art, also of poetry, is, thus, distance.”
Czeslaw Milosz, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, continues, “Thanks to distance the past preserved in our memory is purified and embellished.” We can consider the past “without our former passions” so we can find “details that had escaped our attention.” Rather than creating art “in the moment,” … Read More
So what about Dylan’s song “Blowin’ in the Wind”?
Tony Beck, who wrote his dissertation for Cambridge University on Bob Dylan, notes that Dylan “borrowed extensively” from the English poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Bryon, who also used the “wind” as a central image in their poems. For them, the wind often symbolized change and freedom. It probably … Read More