Sweden and the Great North American Poet-Songwriters

Were you surprised when the Nobel Prize for Literature went to Bob Dylan?  Even though he’s been the subject of much serious lit-crit, including the marvelous Dylan’s Vision of Sin, by the master critic of Milton and T.S. Eliot, Christopher Ricks?

            Well a small hint of where one vote on the panel came from appeared in the Guardian recently, in an article on members who resigned from their lifetime positions over the Nobel’s handling of a sexual harassment claim.  One of the resigners, Klas Östergren, a novelist and screenwriter, ended his resignation letter with these words: “I’m leaving the table, I’m out of the game.”

            So?  He’s quoting one of the songs on Leonard Cohen’s last recording, “You Want It Darker,” released just 19 days before Cohen’s death in 2016.  Cohen, the Canadian poet-songwriter-performer who might be the only peer Dylan had. What a way to go out, Klas.