Few topics have generated more controversy recently than the Swedish Academy’s decision to award Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in literature. Two relevant arguments, however, one for and one against, have so far gone unmade.

The argument for is based on The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1, a collection regarded as canonical since it was first published in 1962 (the same year, incidentally, that Dylan began releasing albums).

The ninth edition contains a section titled “Popular Ballads” devoted to narrative poems of unknown provenance that were passed from one generation to another via song.

Dylan performed one of them, “Bonny Barbara Allen,” during his early Greenwich Village performances. Another, “Lord Randall,” begins, “Oh where ha’e ye been, Lord Randall my son? / O where ha’e ye been, my handsome young man?” In 1962, it provided the template for “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” the most masterly of Dylan’s early masterpieces.

So if the contents of The Norton Anthology of English Literature are literature, ballads are ­literature. And if ­ballads are literature, Dylan’s lyrics, rooted as many of them are in that tradition, are literature too. Case closed.

Except that it isn’t, because if the Swedish Academy were genuinely intent on honoring the literary merits of songwriting, it could’ve chosen Leonard Cohen, a singer-­songwriter with even stronger literary bona fides than Dylan’s.

In addition to his 14 studio and eight live albums, Cohen has published novels and volumes of poetry. And in 2012, he and Chuck Berry (on whose “Too Much Monkey Business” Dylan based “Subterranean Homesick Blues”) received the first-ever PEN Award for Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence.

Cohen turned 82 in September and released his latest album, You Want It Darker (Columbia), last month. Like his Old Ideas (2012) and Popular Problems (2014), it finds him giving sepulchral voice to prayers and confessions that may or may not be of the deathbed ­variety while the instruments and background singers limn the proceedings with a spectral nimbus.

It’s also the most Christ-haunted album of his Judaism-steeped career.

“Magnified, sanctified, be Thy holy name,” Cohen intones in the title track. “Vilified, crucified, in the human frame.” In “Treaty,” he wishes that “there was a treaty between [Christ’s] love and mine.” And he concludes the otherwise Christ-dismissing “It Seemed the Better Way” with an admission that his dismissal may have been hasty: “I better hold my tongue. / I better take my place, / lift this glass of blood, / try to say the grace.”

Although Cohen recently told an audience that he doesn’t “have any spiritual strategy” and that he just “kind of limp[s] along like so many of us do,” You Want It Darker suggests he has seriously contemplated the meeting of his Maker.

Editor’s note: On Thursday, after the issue of the magazine contaning this article went to press, Sony Music confirmed that Leonard Cohen had died. Please see Marvin Olasky’s obituary.

Losing a brother

Eleven days after Bob Dylan won his Nobel, pop singer Bobby Vee (in whose band Dylan once played) passed away at 72.

Vee is best remembered for such early-1960s chart toppers as “Take Good Care of My Baby,” “Run to Him,” and “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.” But it was Dylan’s description of their relationship in his 2004 autobiography Chronicles, Volume One, that made Vee a 21st-century conversation topic. “I’d always thought of him as a brother,” Dylan wrote. “Every time I’d see his name somewhere, it was like he was in the room.”

Apparently, the feeling was mutual. Vee included Dylan’s “The Man in Me” on the album that he recorded shortly after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2011. Titled The Adobe Sessions (and still in print), it was a heartfelt, sweet, and utterly fitting farewell. —A.O.