Are song lyrics genuinely poetry, or is that comparison actually doing both art forms a disservice?

[Transformer Lynx]

The question of whether song lyrics deserve to be treated as genuine poetry became a mainstream talking point when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, a decision that split opinion sharply between those who felt it was a long overdue recognition of lyric writing as a serious literary art form, and those who argued the award should have gone to someone working purely within the traditional written poetry tradition instead.

Defenders of the comparison point to the obvious historical overlap between the two forms, noting that poetry itself began as an oral and often musical tradition long before it was ever primarily experienced on the page, and that songwriters like Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell have all produced lyrics that hold up as genuinely rich, layered writing even when stripped entirely of their melodies and separated from the recordings that made them famous.

Skeptics of the comparison argue that song lyrics are fundamentally written to be completed by music, and that judging them purely as text on a page ignores the crucial role melody, rhythm and vocal performance play in making them actually work, meaning a set of lyrics that reads as fairly ordinary on paper might become genuinely moving once it is actually sung, a transformation that traditional poetry does not rely on in the same way at all.

So where do you land on this one, are the best song lyrics genuinely poetry in their own right, or is that comparison ultimately unfair to both art forms?