For the defense …

… Bob Dylan and the wind of literary idiocy | The Japan Times. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… to bestow it on one of our last popular poets, the distant relative of Rutebeuf, Villon and all the minstrels and songsters of solitude and dereliction; to consecrate a troubadour, a bard of the brotherhood of lonely and lost souls; to crown the author of ballads that have been, to borrow Andre Suares’ phrase about Rimbaud, “a moment in the life” of so many people in the 20th and 21st centuries makes a lot more sense than pulling out of a hat the obscure Rudolf Christoph Eucken or picking poor old Sully Prudhomme instead of Tolstoy.