This week, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Literary critic and former Oxford Professor of Poetry Sir Christopher Ricks explains why his art goes beyond words

Today, the happiest of turmoils all over the world. Rightly a tribute to the art even more than to the artist, the Nobel triumph – like the art itself – will endure. For the triumph of genius does the heart good, and not only the heart.

Some reminders, since one of Dylan’s powers is that of a great reminder:

First, that every artist, insofar as he or she is great as well as original, has had the task of creating the taste by which the art is to be enjoyed (Wordsworth’s conviction). Second, that the art of song is a triple art, a true compound. And it doesn’t make sense to ask which element of a compound is more “important”: the voice, or the music, or the words? (Which is more important in water, the oxygen or the hydrogen?) And that therefore there is a danger, even while we are very grateful this time to the Nobel Committee, if we simply allocate Dylan’s art of song to literature or Literature, of our privileging the words, as though song were not a triangle and often an equilateral triangle.