Sir, - I should like to take this opportunity to congratulate both John Kenny and John McCarthy for their equally articulate and sensible responses (letters page, October 11th) to John Boland's Bookworm article (October 5th) Mr Boland is obviously unaware of the recognition that Bob Dylan has already received for his outstanding contribution to popular culture in the latter half of this century. Before Seamus Heaney was ever considered for France's most illustrious cultural honour, Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Bob Dylan was presented by the French Government with this prestigious title.
If Mr Boland needs more persuasion of Dylan's credibility as one worthy enough to be a candidate for a Nobel Prize, he might well listen to Maya Angelou and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom have, since the early 1960s, extolled Dylan's masterly poetic vision. But then, Angelou and Ginsberg probably don't make the canon for Mr Boland either.
Perhaps we might leave the last words to the philosopher Herbert Marcuse: "It is because of this `universal' significance of art as form that we may find the meaning of revolution better expressed in Bertolt Brecht's most perfect lyrics than in his explicitly political polemics; or in Bob Dylan's most `soulful' and deeply personal songs . . . Both Brecht and Dylan have one message to make an end with things as they are. Even in the event of a total absence of political content their works can invoke, for a vanishing moment, the image of a liberated world and the pain of an alienated one." - Yours, etc.,
Terenure Road North,
Terenure,
Dublin 6.