By Isaac Dan Bw’Onyancha
The death of Dolly Parton recently invites more than nostalgia for a remarkable singer. It should also provoke a question among scholars and educators: Have we been looking for poetry in the wrong places?
Dolly Parton was not merely a legendary country music singer and songwriter. She was, in many respects, a consummate poet whose chosen medium happened to be song. Her lyrics drew from ordinary experiences of life—poverty, family, love, longing, loneliness, dignity, work and resilience—and transformed them into memorable narratives rich in metaphor, imagery and emotional insight.
Also Read
Consider Coat of Many Colors. A simple childhood story about a garment made from scraps becomes a profound meditation on poverty, maternal love, identity and dignity. What others see as rags, the child experiences as wealth because the garment embodies her mother’s love. It is a deceptively simple story carrying remarkable psychological and social depth.
The same poetic intelligence appears throughout her work. Love Is Like a Butterfly turns love into an image of beauty and fragility. Jolene uses imagery of physical beauty to explore jealousy, insecurity and vulnerability. 9 to 5 turns the routine of working life into a commentary on labour and exploitation. The Bargain Store and I Will Always Love You similarly transform ordinary experiences into reflections on human worth, emotional wounds and the paradox of letting go.
But Dolly’s literary quality goes beyond metaphor. There is a distinctive lyrical poesy in her writing: the cadence, simplicity, imagery, narrative movement and musicality of her words. Her language is deeply endearing to the ear, yet it does not sacrifice intellectual substance. She had the rare ability to make profound observations sound effortless.
This challenges a common misconception about popular art. We sometimes mistake accessibility for simplicity and simplicity for intellectual shallowness. Dolly demonstrates the opposite. A poem does not become less sophisticated because millions can understand it. Making complex human experiences accessible without reducing their complexity may itself be one of the highest achievements of the poet.
Her work also sits at the intersection of literature and lived culture. Her childhood experiences, particularly those of growing up in poverty, became narrative material through which she explored class, family, gender, aspiration, memory and human dignity. The personal became universal.
This raises an important question for our universities: Why should literary study stop at poetry written for the page?
We need not displace Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickinson or any other canonical writer. Rather, we should enlarge the conversation. Dolly Parton’s songs could sit alongside canonical poetry in the study of metaphor, narrative, intertextuality, popular culture, gender, class, memory and identity.
The university should not be afraid of popular culture. It should interrogate it.
Our students already encounter poetry beyond the printed page. They hear it in music, spoken word, theatre and other forms of popular expression. Scholarship should therefore be sufficiently adventurous to examine where language becomes art, regardless of the medium through which it reaches us.
Dolly’s passing offers us an opportunity to reconsider the boundaries we have placed around literature. Perhaps we should not ask whether an artist belongs in the lecture hall simply because her work was popular. We should ask whether the work rewards close reading, critical interpretation and intellectual engagement.
Much of Dolly Parton’s work clearly does.
Let us therefore mourn Dolly the singer, celebrate Dolly the songwriter and recognise Dolly the poet.
Her words travelled through melodies into millions of ears. They entertained, comforted and provoked reflection. Now that her earthly journey has come to an end, the words remain.
Perhaps that is where literature begins.
-The author is a Seasoned Poet, Performing Artist, Teacher of English and Literature
