What’s in a name? Writing across borders of poetry and music

Bob Dylan’s recent speech to the Swedish Academy led to a flurry of commentary about the “smoky, meditative jazz-piano arrangement” of the speech, what Dylan did and didn’t say, and whether he’d used Sparknotes to quote from Moby Dick. It takes me back to the high feelings and combative discussions that circulated last year, when the Nobel Prize committee announced that it had awarded the 2016 Prize in Literature to Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.