Bob Dylan has released his 31st studio album this week. Together Through Life brings him back home to invention, creating an intoxicating mix of south-of-the-border country-rock, a 10-song jam-session-like album which is wistful, angry but reconciled to what cards life deals.

In fact, it's the Zim, at 67, at his very best, and prompted me to ponder, as I played the CD driving into Belfast the other day, whether artists get better with age, as in Dylan's case, or whether some grow old, outliving their creative muse?

At a time when we are living longer, and the provision of pensions is in doubt, this ‘country for old men' has significant implications in terms of welfare. But, one could easily argue, growing old and living longer also has implications for art, literature, film, theatre and music. Who shall we follow into this new country of the old?

Philip Roth (b 1933) is a case in point. The enfant terrible of American fiction shocked the reading world 40 years ago with Portnoy's Complaint. Its comedy took off from the previously unmentionable fact that young men masturbate an awful lot more often than they get the girl.

Forty years on, in the aptly-titled Exit Ghost, the last of Roth's Nathan Zuckerman novels, the hero-narrator has a prostatectomy go wrong. Paradoxically (like TS Eliot's withered, sexless Tiresias in The Waste Land) this empowers him with a clearer comprehension of the human condition. The circle of life is complete in Roth's late-life fiction, with even the laughs coming fewer.

Do artists get better with age? It's not necessarily always the case. You could easily take 30 years off Wordsworth's late, largely listless, life and give it to Keats. John Lennon was creatively washed-up when he was shot dead in New York city.

Some artists, such as Beethoven, with his late quartets, may need many years to arrive at their creative best but Miles Davis should never have gone beyond Kind of Blue, with all that late-life navel-gazing.

For some, talent is spent early. Poetry, as he admitted himself, had given up on Philip Larkin in his 50s. Another 10 years beyond the 63 he was granted would have been wasted. Those years could have served Keats well — or Sylvia Plath.

Older actors can portray age convincingly. Robert De Niro (b 1943) was much more engaging as the evil old Bill Sullivan in The Good Shepherd than as the young, but cosmetically made older, Noodles Aaronson in Once Upon a Time in America.

At sixtysomething, De Niro sure plays it for real.

Whether Gran Torino is a better movie than A Fistful of Dollars is debatable but Clint Eastwood, its director-star, was not afraid to look what he is, looks-wise at 78, not about to make any one’s day. It is also the first Eastwood film in which the star dies.

Leonard Cohen, at 78, is still doing world tours.

Where an artist of mature years comes into his or her own is what Henry James called ‘the distinguished thing'.

When, in The Tempest, Prospero breaks his staff and goes off to live in a cave, his every other thought, he says, will be of death. As the 90-year-old Diana Athill, the British literary agent who worked closely with Roth — and our own Brian Moore — puts it in her memoir, Somewhere Towards the End, life and its various artistic interpretations only really make sense when you are somewhere towards the end.

Of Dylan's new album the question is not “Is it as good as The Times They Are a-Changin'?” but rather “Has he got there?” Is the circle complete?

The lyrics of one track, Life is Hard, haunts us with the hint that the man himself feels his end is nigh: “The sun is sinking low/I guess it's time to go/I feel a chilly breeze/In place of memories.”

Yeats wrote the line “That is no country for old men” in Sailing to Byzantium. It was popularised by the movie that ran off with the 2008 Oscars. It is never easy to know what exactly directors the Coen Brothers are getting at. Nor precisely what Cormac McCarthy (b 1933) meant in his 2005 novel.

But it's pretty plain what the 63-year-old Yeats meant. The old must leave sex and frivolity and youth to those who do it best, and instead embrace art. It's all they have, the only way that they can hold back the years. Otherwise, “An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick”.

There is a lot of debate about whether working people should retire at 65. It will be a less wondrous world if writers, singers, film-makers, actors, musicians and artists do.

Our old (and getting older) country is going to need the wisdom and insight that only the old have about their ‘country'.

Rock on, Bob.