On April 7th 2008 Bob Dylan won a special award from the Pulitzer board for his musical compositions with the following Special Citation “For his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power”.
If you get a Pulitzer it usually means you spoke up about something important and got a lot of smart people thinking and talking. Put that way, it's not surprising that Bob Dylan has been given one.
“We didn’t just look up one afternoon and say, ‘Why don’t we give this to Dylan?’ ” said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzers. “There’s a history there, and a lot of deliberation and effort to figure out who would be truly worthy.”
The names of other pop and rock artists have come up. “A couple of my friends on the music committee say Frank Zappa; somebody else says Stevie Wonder,” Mr. Gissler said. “But in terms of a really important and dramatic step, this was a good one to take.
”Dylan's provocative lyrics contain the sort of truth-fueled call-to-arms that journalists aspire to: "Come mothers, come fathers, throughout the land/ And don't criticize what you can't understand/ Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/ Your old road is rapidly aging/ So get out of the new one if you can't lend a hand/ For the times, they are a-changin."
The Pulitzer might be an appropriate prize if it is meant to acknowledge Mr. Dylan as a poet in the sense of a visionary or paradigmatic seer, said Christopher Ricks, a professor of humanities at Boston University and the author of “Dylan’s Visions of Sin,” but not if it is given in its traditional spirit as a recognition of writing or composition.
