The Nobel Prize committee announced on October 13, 2016, that it would be awarding Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". Dylan remained silent for days after receiving the award, before telling journalist
Edna Gundersen that getting the award was "amazing, incredible. Who ever dreams about something like that?" The Swedish Academy announced in November 2016 that Dylan would not travel to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize Ceremony due to "pre-existing commitments". At the
Nobel Banquet in Stockholm on December 10, 2016, Dylan's speech was given by
Azita Raji, U.S. Ambassador to Sweden.
Patti Smith performed his song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" to orchestral accompaniment. On April 2, 2017, academy secretary
Sara Danius reported: "Earlier today the Swedish Academy met with Bob Dylan for a private ceremony [with no media present] in Stockholm, during which Dylan received his gold medal and diploma. Twelve members of the Academy were present. Spirits were high. Champagne was had. Quite a bit of time was spent looking closely at the gold medal, in particular the beautifully crafted back, an image of a young man sitting under a laurel tree who listens to the Muse. Taken from
Virgil's
Aeneid, the inscription reads:
Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes, loosely translated as 'And they who bettered life on earth by their newly found mastery'". Dylan's Nobel Lecture was posted on the Nobel Prize website on June 5, 2017.
The New York Times pointed out that, in order to collect the prize's eight million Swedish kronor (US$900,000), the Swedish Academy's rules stipulate the laureate "must deliver a lecture within six months of the official ceremony, which would have made Mr. Dylan's deadline June 10". Academy secretary Danius commented: "The speech is extraordinary and, as one might expect, eloquent. Now that the lecture has been delivered, the Dylan adventure is coming to a close". In his Nobel Prize lecture, Dylan wrote about the impact of three books on him:
Herman Melville's
Moby-Dick,
Erich Maria Remarque's
All Quiet on the Western Front and
Homer's
Odyssey. He concluded: "Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They're meant to be sung, not read. The words in
Shakespeare's plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, 'Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story'".In 2017, the year after Dylan received his Nobel Prize, Harvard University Classics Professor
Richard F. Thomas published a book entitled
Why Bob Dylan Matters. In this work, Thomas suggests that Dylan's lyrics contain many literary allusions, including to the works of classic poets
Homer,
Ovid and
Virgil. To support this claim, Thomas offered multiple examples of Dylan's 21st-century lyrics side-by-side with lines from these poets. Towards the beginning of his book, Thomas further argues for situating Dylan firmly alongside those whose work seems to have inspired him, noting: "For the past forty years, as a classics professor, I have been living in the worlds of the Greek and Roman poets, reading them, writing about them, and teaching them to students in their original languages and in English translation. I have for even longer been living in the world of Bob Dylan’s songs, and in my mind Dylan long ago joined the company of those ancient poets.". == Reactions ==