THE only surprise about Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature is that is has taken so long to be awarded.

Perhaps the reason for the delay is that many who were young in the 1960s but went on to become influential figures did not manage to forgive him for “going electric” in the summer of 1965.

That is obviously a long time ago but the bitterness of the moment lives on for some who insisted that he had shed his artistic integrity and that he had betrayed his supposed folk music purity.

Read more: Bob Dylan wins Nobel Prize in literature

Others found it hard to forgive him for his extended flirtation with fundamentalist Christianity. Too few people respected him for what he was: a creative artist of authentic genius who was experimenting, developing, moving on.

The phrase “an artist who reinvents himself and his music” is over-used but if it can be truthfully applied to anyone that person must be Dylan.

In the early 1960s Dylan carried many burdens. He was regarded variously as a prophet, as the spokesman for an angry and confused generation and, for the wise few, a poet who just put his poetry into songs, some of them universally popular, some of them wilfully obscure.

Now that these bitter controversies are it is time to respect him for what he is: simply the supreme figure in the popular culture of the second half or the20th century.

Read more: Bob Dylan wins Nobel Prize in literature

I am conscious that this might read a little like an elegy.

The important point to make about Dylan is that people will be talking about him and appreciating his creative output, encompassing wonderful lyricism and obsessively eclectic musicianship, 100 years from now; of that I am absolutely certain.

Harry Reid is a former editor of The Herald.