单选题   Para. 1 'I'm the first person who'll put it to you,' Bob Dylan said in a 1978 interview, 'and the last person who'll explain it to you.'
    Para. 2 The Swedish Academy, which awarded Mr. Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, has put it to us, and it has no explaining to do to most readers and listeners, however much they might have been pulling for Philip Roth or Don DeLillo or Margaret Atwood.
    Para. 3 ①Mr. Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minn., in 1941, was inspired when young by potent American vernacular music, songs by performers like Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Robert Johnson. ②When his voice became fully his own, in his work of the mid-to-late 1960s that led up to what is probably his greatest song, 'Like a Rolling Stone,' no one had ever heard pop songs with so many oracular, tumbling words in them.
    Para. 4 ①Before this Nobel Prize, Mr. Dylan has been recognized by the world of literature and poetry. ②In 2008, the Pulitzer Prize jury awarded him a special citation 'for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.'
    Para. 5 ①His songs have always packed social and political power to match the imagery. ②In his book 'The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood,' Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke of what Mr. Dylan's songs meant to his father as well as to a generation: ③'Dylan's voice was awful, an aged quaver that sounded nothing like the deep-throated or silky R&B that Dad took as gospel. ④But the lyrics wore him down, until he played Dylan in that addicted manner of college kids who cordon off portions to decipher the prophecies of their favorite band. ⑤Dad heard poetry, but more than that an angle that confirmed what a latent part of him had already suspected.' ⑥What was confirmed was this: The Vietnam War was a moral disgrace.
    Para. 6 ①Songs are not poems, exactly. ②Songs prick our senses in different manner. ③Many of Mr. Dylan's lyrics can no doubt, as English poet Philip Larkin put, look half-baked when set starkly alone on a white page.
    Para. 7 ①But Mr. Dylan's work—'with its iambics, its clackety-clack rhymes, and its scattergun images,' as the critic Robert Christgau wrote—has its own kind of emblematic verbal genius. ②His diction, focus and tone are those of a caustically gifted word man; his metrical dexterity is everywhere apparent. ③He is capable of rhetorical organization; more often he scatters his rhetoric like seed, or like curses.
    Para. 8 In an interview in The New York Times, the venerated critic and scholar Christopher Ricks summed up our sense of the best of Mr. Dylan's oeuvre: 'I just think we're terrifically lucky to be alive at a time when he is.'