Lyrics as literature: when the song earns the page

In “Idiot Wind” Bob Dylan rhymes “skull” with “Capitol” — an off-rhyme that ought to fail and instead detonates, because a skull and the Capitol are both white domes and an idiot wind blows through both. The critic Christopher Ricks, who has spent a career on Milton, Keats and Tennyson, gives the line a six-word verdict: “An imperfect rhyme, perfectly judged.” Begin there, with one couplet doing visible literary work, rather than with the tired quarrel about whether songwriting deserves the Nobel. The question “are lyrics literature?” is a bad one, because it demands a single yes or no. A better instrument is a test.

A test, not a verdict

Here is the test: a lyric earns a literary reading when its language survives the loss of the music and rewards close attention as text. It is deliberately modest. It does not crown lyrics as poetry or banish them from it; it simply asks what a particular set of words can do once the melody is taken away. Dylan’s 2016 Nobel made the argument public — the Swedish Academy honoured him “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” — but it settled nothing. The test is more useful than the prize, because it can be applied line by line, and because it is honest about what it cannot see.

One couplet, close-read

Watch it work. The couplet runs: “Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull / From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.” Ricks’s reading turns on the metaphor: the rhyme is true, he argues, “because of the relation of the Capitol to the skull (another of those white domes), with which it disconcertingly rhymes” — a head of state, a body politic, an idiot wind moving through both. That the rhyme is technically imperfect is the point; the slippage enacts the derangement the line describes. And it was earned in revision: Dylan’s earlier draft had the flatter “blowing every time you move your jaw / From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Mardi Gras”, which scans but means little. Allen Ginsberg called the final version “one rhyme that took in the whole nation”. This is the page test passing cleanly: strip the music and the language still rewards the scrutiny we bring to a poem.

Where the page and the performance were never separate

But the test rests on an assumption — that page and performance are separable — and the deep history of lyric says they were once the same thing. Defending Dylan, the Academy’s Sara Danius reached back: “If you look back, far back, 2,500 years or so, you discover Homer and Sappho and they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to, that were meant to be performed, often with instruments.” Sappho is the sharpest case. She is thought to have written some ten thousand lines; roughly six hundred and fifty survive, and only a single poem is complete. We read her through wreckage — and the most literary modern treatment of her, Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter, makes the wreckage visible, filling the torn papyri with square brackets and white space, “a free space of imaginal adventure” where the lost song used to be. That oral composition is a real, demonstrable category and not a romantic figure of speech was proved in the field: between 1933 and 1935 Milman Parry and Albert Lord recorded illiterate Balkan singers accompanying themselves on the gusle and found in them the same formulaic architecture as Homer. The page, for the oldest lyric we have, is the part that happened to survive the silence of the instrument.

The counter-case, with teeth

And here the test shows its blind spot. Little Richard opens “Tutti Frutti” (1955) with “A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom” — a verbal imitation of a drum fill, pure non-lexical sound, a line that scores precisely zero on the page. Yet the Library of Congress added the record to the National Recording Registry, saying it announced “a new era in music”, and Rolling Stone called that nonsense refrain “the most inspired rock lyric ever recorded”. The page test cannot see it, because its whole genius is that it refuses to be read. Stephen Sondheim, of all people, makes the distinction technical rather than sentimental: “Poetry is an art of concision, lyrics of expansion”; “music straitjackets a poem… whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn’t need music; lyrics do.” A lyric, he insists, must be underwritten, because the listener gets only one pass in real time. By that logic a line thin on the page may be perfectly engineered for the ear — and even Dylan, the laureate, voted against the page in his Nobel lecture: “songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read.”

The page is a sieve that catches Dylan’s “skull / Capitol” and lets “A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom” fall straight through — and it is right to do both.

So the verdict is not which songs are literature. It is what kind of evidence the page is. Sappho settles it: what survives on the page is precisely the part that needed the lyre least, and we have been reading her, for two and a half thousand years, through the holes where the music used to be. The page is one test a lyric can pass. It is exacting, and it is honest, and it is never the whole record of where the writing lives.

Sources

“Idiot Wind” — the “skull / Capitol” rhyme, Ricks’s reading, the earlier draft, Ginsberg — Wikipedia.
The Nobel citation and Sara Danius’s oral-tradition defence — CNN; Dylan’s Nobel lecture (“meant to be sung, not read”) — NobelPrize.org.
The poetry of Sappho — survival, performance to the lyre — Wikipedia; Anne Carson, If Not, Winter — the bracketed gaps — Wikipedia.
Milman Parry and Albert Lord, the guslar fieldwork (1933–35) — Wikipedia.
“Tutti Frutti” — the drum-fill refrain, the National Recording Registry, Rolling Stone — Wikipedia.
Stephen Sondheim on poetry versus lyrics (Finishing the Hat) — The Sublime.
Leonard Cohen, poet and novelist before songwriter — Academy of American Poets.
Hero photo: “Graz University Library reading room” by Dr. Marcus Gossler, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.