Not an Onion headline: The Nobel committee can’t reach the famously mercurial singer, who has yet to return an RSVP to the award banquet.

Not everyone is happy after Dylan’s win. Should the Nobel Prize really go to someone for whom it’s just a feather in the cap, rather than a career-defining achievement?

Serious thread on why you’re seeing writers disappointed by Dylan Nobel. It’s not that we don’t love Girl from the North Country 1/n

— Hari Kunzru (@harikunzru) October 13, 2016

The question of whether Dylan should even be up for the award lurks, too, but he’s never been uncertain about whether he is a singer or a poet—or a folkie or a rocker, a faker or a prophet, or Robert Zimmerman, or Elston Gunn, or Lucky Wilbury. Because he just hasn’t cared. 

If Dylan’s career is charted a series of identity crises, his radical commitment to performance emerges as the only constant, and here we just have to excerpt from a brilliant LitHub post about how Dylan’s protean temperament won him lasting fame.

All these different Dylans had one thing in common: whatever mood he was in, he didn’t give a damn about anything but being true to himself.

By the end of the week, Sally had fallen in love with Dylan. Dylan gave her hope: he showed that you could make your life a work of art. She loved the way that he remained fluid, reinventing himself endlessly, refusing to be trapped by other people’s expectations. She wanted to be like that. She wanted to reinvent herself endlessly. She wanted to be fiercely, ruthlessly herself, committed to nothing except honesty. She wanted to go electric.

In Dylan, with Dylan, Sally can be herself: noncommittal. Free. Honest. A little selfish. Even after she has tried commitment, played house with her college boyfriend, taken a job and kept it for a while, she still thinks of herself as a “Dylanist.” At the end of the novel, Sally reassesses:

She wondered if she was still what Ben would call a Dylanist. She probably was, and she’d probably always be one: restless, not really political, yet edgily intent against selling out; putting her feelings first. Dylan himself, with his restless honesty, would probably always mean a lot to her. But lately, when she looked at his records, she could never find anything she wanted to hear. His concerns weren’t her concerns. His work contained nothing about loss; nothing about gain—his own, or that of the people he loved; nothing about being a father, or being a son. Nothing about the complexities of relationships that last.

What does Dylan know about relationships that last? Even the most sympathetic of his biographers would agree with Sally: not very much. Some think he has even sold out his own talent, become dishonest. His turn back to traditional music on 1993’s World Gone Wrong, while unsurprising for those who keep Harding handy, felt to many like an admission of defeat. He had gone acoustic again. But that is, after all, part of being Dylan, being adamantly contradictory, doing the unexpected (he even managed to win the Nobel Prize without trying), ignoring critics and fans both. Ruthlessness is part of the story. So is the refusal to commit, for more than a moment, as long as it takes to do a tour, or make an album. There is always another mask, and another biographer determined to unmask him.

A disproportionate amount of attention to Dylan’s poetic legacy seems to land on the 11-minute epic “Desolation Row,” off 1965′s Highway 61 Revisited, and particularly on the notion that he used it to link himself with poetic forebears. 

Oxford poetry professor Christopher Ricks, who did a lot of the PR in terms of raising the possibility that Dylan deserved the Nobel, says a particular verse, about “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower,” inspired him to think of Dylan as a poet for the first time. (He also says “Lay, Lady, Lay” is Donne-level, which even this enthusiast finds a stretch.)

Ginsburg himself demurred when a student brought “Desolation Row” up in class, averring that, to that point, Dylan didn’t understand Pound, having only ever read major poets in anthologies, rather than in complete works. In the same exchange, he praised Dylan over Pound for learning from black creativity and art in America, something the sometime-fascist Pound missed entirely. “‘Desolation Row?’ That’s a minstrel song through and through.”