On his 50th birthday, Stephen Patrick Morrissey, formerly a skinny indy kid from Hulme, a dilapidated quarter of Manchester, will this morning receive the perfect present, the first serious academic study of his work which compares him to the Nobel prize-winner Samuel Beckett, and approvingly ranks him alongside some of the greats of literature: Philip Larkin, John Betjeman and Oscar Wilde.

These unexpected accolades come courtesy of Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, written by Gavin Hopps, a research fellow at the University of St Andrews, who plants the singer-songwriter in ther first rank of British Romantic heroes.

Dr Hopps, a student of Lord Byron, and founding trustee of the Scottish Byron Society, made no apology for celebrating his pop idol. “I am not trying to make Morrissey into a poet,” he said. “But I am trying to set his ideas in a wider context, within a tradition of ideas and culture. He transcends pop.”

Morrissey's Romantic characteristics could be traced back to his early days in the Smiths, the band which flourished in the early 1980s, said Dr Hopps, and aspects of that persona had lingered. “At the centre was a vulnerability, a foregrounding of weakness, set against the brashness of the period, epitomised by Margaret Thatcher, His persona was a negative reflection of that, a whole cluster of characteristics, frailty, weakness a notion of being damaged, which contrasted very strongly with the New Romantics, bands like Duran Duran.”

But comparisons with mere pop stars are quickly left behind in such a serious academic work. Instead, literary analogies are instructive, insisted Dr Hopps. With Beckett, Morrissey shared the same kind of “characters who have never come to life”, exemplified by a song such as That's How People Grow Up which is on his most recent album, Years of Refusal. The song includes the line “Let me live before I grow up”, which has, on this analysis, a Beckettian ring. “There is a common interest with Beckett in how loneliness is an existential crisis which eats away at the very fabric of being," said Dr Hopps.

Affinities with Larkin - who last year was placed first by The Times on a list of the 50 best British writers since 1945 - are more to do with subject matter. “They both write poetry of the unpoetic,” said Dr Hopps. “Morrissey likes writing about frisbees and leather elbow patches. There is a conjunction of elevated and colloquial ideas, which you get in a song like Everyday is Like Sunday - “Trudging slowly over wet sand/ To the bench where your clothes were stolen”. These conjunctions are very powerful in Larkin.” Though Morrissey himself had not quoted Larkin in his work, he had approvingly cited Betjeman in interviews and there were obvious similarities between a poet who famously wished the destruction of Slough, and a lyricist who pleaded “Come, come, nuclear bomb” on an unnamed seaside town, said Dr Hopps.

“There's a gaucheness to Betjeman, but also a lightness of touch. He likes to write about little characters, about little slices of life. That is very close to Morrissey.

Dr Hopps compared Morrissey's love of the epigram with the wit of Wilde. “Morrissey has that quirk of seeing himself as a work of art, he speaks like a great aesthete in epigrams. There's a love of play and artifice. There's an art in attitude and in lyrics which connects with Wilde,” he said.

However, as the author of a number of papers on pop music, including Morrissey and the Light that Never Goes Out, A Foreigner at Home: Morrissey and the Art of Embarrassment, Celibacy, Abstinence and Rock 'n' Roll: Morrissey's Deconstruction of Pop, Dr Hopps' bibliography may yet disprove Wilde's epigram: “It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.”

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