When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a poet friend, whose opinions I value, told me she was disappointed John Ashbery had been overlooked. It wasn’t a question of whether a songwriter should be eligible for a literature prize, but instead, in the context of public discussion swirling around the idea of Dylan’s lyrics as poetry, that he was filling a precious slot in a prize that honours novelists far more regularly. Dylan’s slot, the poet’s slot, she argued, should have been Ashes’. He was a poet, almost without peer, who towered over the last seventy years of English language poetry. She worried that the next time the prize was awarded to a poet he would no longer be with us. She was right.

On first glance I don’t have a beef with the idea of Dylan as a poet. He exploded the possibility of pop lyrics in his brilliant mid-sixties trilogy of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde where he yearned for his ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, offering ‘warehouse eyes’ and ‘Arabian drums’ to her ‘sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row’. That masterpiece ranges across five octaves of AAABBCCCB, every unexpected image suspended with an elegant caesura. When I first heard it, in my mid-teens, it was a masterclass in the power of unexpected images colliding. The surrealism of ‘Desolation Row’, ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ and ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’ helped me unlock French symbolism, cracking open the field of my own writing in the process. Add in Desire, Blood on the Tracks and a smattering of other songs from his five decade career and the poet label fits snugly on his shoulders.