I thought this was interesting in the 1989 Rolling Stone interview (I just read it because they linked to it from their obituary) that he seemed to admire Dylan much more than any of his other rock contemporaries:

Let's talk about some of your contemporaries. Bob Dylan, for example. He hung out with Warhol at the Factory quite a bit in the mid-Sixties and was at the time, like you, busy transforming rock & roll songwriting.
I always go out and get the latest Dylan album. Bob Dylan can turn a phrase, man. Like his last album [Down in the Groove], his choice of songs. "Going ninety miles an hour down a dead-end street" – I'd give anything if I could have written that or that other one, "Rank Strangers to Me." The key word there is rank.

I can really listen to something like that The rest of it is all pop. I have zero interest in it. But Dylan continuously knocks me out. "Brownsville Girl," the thing he did with Sam Shepard, he said, "Even the SWAT teams around here are getting pretty corrupt." I was on the floor. I have that same reaction to some of my own stuff. And the only other person I can think of who does that for me is Dylan.

What about John Lennon? Like you, he wrote frankly in his songs about his life and lifestyle.
He wrote a song called "Mother" that I thought was a really good song. "Jealous Guy." I liked his stuff away from the Beatles. Just my own taste. But the kind of phrasing that knocks me out is Dylan's. For language, Dylan kills me to this day.

Bruce Springsteen.
I like him in concert. He's a great live performer. What I really like is the little skits with Clarence and everything, these great spoken introductions.

They are both very literary, poets.