He used to tease critics by claiming he was only “a song and dance man” but, whether he likes it or not, Bob Dylan has entered the canon. To mark the UK’s National Poetry Day next month a “Dylan Education Pack” will be issued and pupils in key stages will be invited to study a selection of the master’s songs and to compose a Dylan-inspired ballad on the theme of dreams.

In a sense, there’s nothing new about secondary school kids burrowing into Dylan. When I was a teenager in the 60s, I was doing just what current crop of teenagers are being officially encouraged to do — trying to make sense of his lyrics. But I came to Dylan outside school, throughcontemporaries, an experience linked to a theme of Dylan’s: the need to speak the truth to power, regardless of expert opinion.

Whether or not his lyrics work as poetry on print, he remains a great writer. His range puts most modern poets to shame: from minimalist eloquence to delirious verbal and sensuous richness, from the comic to the tender via petty resentments and transcendental longings, often within the compass of a single song.

One of the songs the British students will be looking at next month is a A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall, which contains the wonderfully concise, ominous, arresting line: “The executioner’s face is always well hidden”. Most of us could spend a lifetime writing and not come up with a gem as bold as this (written when Dylan was 21), invoking some of the ghastlier truths of our age: the ease with which great and lethal powers destroy human life from a safe distance, the need to see through the masks of power, the absence of accountability. You could fill a classroom session just drawing out the implications of that one sentence.

Or look at the insertion of the epithet “hard” before “rain”. It’s usually claimed that Dylan wrote the song in response to the Cuban missile crisis. In fact, he debuted it some weeks before the Soviet build-up was known to the public. None the less, the song was recognised as a reflection on the crisis of the nuclear age. Today it reads like a prophecy of environmental catastrophe: “I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests, / I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans”.