The music is an essential dimension of the text. To remove it and only leave the words is like deciding whether a movie is great based on its screenplay, or taking all the words of a poem and writing it out as prose. The piece that as created to be heard, and of course it won't be good if you remove a whole dimension of it.
The author's argument seems to be "literature equals words," which I, and evidently the Nobel committee, think is a naive way of viewing literature. Music has always been tied to poetry, and the advent of recorded audio made sound people's primary way of experiencing poetry again, as it was before mass literacy. In my opinion, Dylan brought music back to poetry, not poetry to music (which is how many like to characterize his work).
The author's argument seems to be "literature equals words," which I, and evidently the Nobel committee, think is a naive way of viewing literature. Music has always been tied to poetry, and the advent of recorded audio made sound people's primary way of experiencing poetry again, as it was before mass literacy. In my opinion, Dylan brought music back to poetry, not poetry to music (which is how many like to characterize his work).