Greer: Dylan ‘not fit to tie Guthrie’s laces’

Germaine Greer (pictured) has cast her critical eye over the lyrics of Bob Dylan – and found them severely wanting. In today's Guardian, she writes: "In the 1960s and 70s, I battled students who wanted me to teach Bob Dylan rather than Donne or Yeats. Ever since, I have had screeds of stuff sent to me by people who thought that rhyme equalled reason, to whom I had gently to explain that their agonised posturings wouldn't pass for poetry. I blame Dylan."

To support her case, Greer quotes some lines from Dylan's song Visions of Johanna, among them:

Ev'rything's been returned which was owed

On the back of the fish-trucks that loads

While my conscience explodes.

Greer writes that this sort of "verse" crosses her desk at every week at Cambridge, where she is a special lecturer on English at Newham College. "It's not verse, not even doggerel. Nor is it prose, because it doesn't make sense. Its combination of pretentiousness and illiteracy isn't surprising, which would be something; it's just annoying. God knows why the texts put to 20th-century music began to be called lyrics rather than words."

It seems Greer has an axe to grind. She goes on: "In my eyes, he (Dylan) wasn't fit to tie Woody Guthrie's shoelaces. I have never forgiven him for keeping his fans waiting at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969 for three hours, from 9 o'clock till midnight, before he would sing a word. Creeps sometimes make good poets, but Bob Zimmerman [Dylan's real name] isn't one of them."