Life & Mortality Quote by Bob Dylan

Dylan’s greatest flex has never been the harmonica rack; it’s authorship. By insisting he’s “a poet first and a musician second,” he’s not begging for legitimacy so much as reordering the terms of the deal. Don’t judge me by how cleanly I hit notes, he implies; judge me by how dangerously I arrange meaning. In a culture that files musicians under entertainment, Dylan claims the older, pricklier role: the poet as witness, trickster, scavenger of American language.

The line works because it’s both self-mythology and preemptive defense. “I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet” isn’t sentimental; it’s a declaration of artistic jurisdiction. A poet gets to contradict himself, change masks, disappear into metaphor, be “difficult” without issuing a customer-service apology. That posture has always been central to Dylan’s career: the refusal to stay interpretable on demand, from going electric to dodging spokesperson status in the protest era to the late-career reinvention as a grizzled archivist of folk and blues.

There’s also a quiet jab at the machinery around him. The music industry sells personalities and product cycles; poetry suggests vocation, obsession, even a kind of sanctioned misfit life. Coming from the first rock star to win the Nobel in Literature, the claim reads less like a genre distinction than a power move: Dylan reminding us that his real instrument is language, and the songs are simply how he smuggles it into the bloodstream of mass culture.