Jamie, yes, I missed Michael’s first post about Dylan, so my apologies to him.
On the Emily Dickinson comparison you make, her recognition came after death, while the poets winning the Nobel are very much alive. I’m all for marginal talent being recognised, but I always thought the Nobel was for outstanding and well-known achievements, not marginally known ones. Is that the case?
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Jamie McKendrick wrote:
Thanks for this, David. I should let Michael reply for himself but I think you missed his first post which warmly welcomed Dylan as Nobel recipient. What his next post was pointing to was the international impact (foul word these days) of Transtromer's poems, widely loved way before the Nobel. Michael will know better than me that in Sweden Transtromer is known of by most schoolchildren and appreciated far beyond what you still belittlingly call 'poetry "fandom" circles'.
But as you seem to acknowledge at the end of your post, 'small audiences' (not at all the case with these or many of the other Nobel writers of the last 10 years) aren't anyway an indicator of lack of quality or inconsequentiality. What could have been more obscure in the nineteenth century than Emily Dickinson, a poet now justly considered one of the greatest not just of her age but of any.
That might also be something to value in the Nobel awards - the celebration of a talent insufficiently recognised rather than an accolade for a globally super-celebrated artist like Dylan?
That said, Tim's list of the Nobel writers he's read and hasn't makes me feel likewise a bit shocked at how many of them I haven't read including, probably shamefully, Jelinek.
Jamie
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