Some people have said that awarding Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature

represents the baby boomers final triumph over a once magnificent Western culture

that so dwarf their own artistic achievements that they had to destroy it

in order to feel any respect for themselves.

Some say giving a major literature prize to a folk songwriter

was the baby boomers way of saying,

yes, the geniuses of ages past created the plays of Shakespeare,

the poems of Keats and the novels of Dickens and Tolstoy,

but we listen to simplistic pro-stest songs sung by a guy with a harmonica

and a voice like an alarm clock buzzer, and so we're going to celebrate ourselves

because by golly that's how much we suck.

But the Nobel Prize committee says Dylan is a great poet

and that means we should now study Dylan's words as we've studied

the words of the great poets of the past. For instance,

John Milton was a great poet of the past and here he is describing

how classical cultures created distorted myths

about the fall of Lucifer from heaven.

How he fell from heaven they fabled

thrown by angry jove, sheer or the crystal battlements

from mourn to noon he fell, from noon

to do he eve a summer's day

and with the setting sun dropped

...