03-27-2019, 05:27 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-27-2019, 05:30 PM by RiverNotch.)
Calling Chaucer's work as crude ramblings, while a questionable literary judgment, is not so a historical judgment. Spenser definitely is the more influential of the two, since, reading a lot of work on Augustan poets at the moment, the copies of Chaucer throughout most of history were kinda terrible, and the likes of (if I recall right) Pope and Dryden had a fairly low estimation of him.
Another questionable judgment is calling Shakespeare's plays rubbish, but this time both as literary and historical. The estimations of Shakespeare's work are variable, but two things in common are that his work is for the most part solid, and at least one or two of his plays manage to be, both in terms of being a play and in terms of being poetry, 'great'. But that's not what's being discussed. I think for a poet in this regard to be considered a 'poet' only by his profession as such terribly limits the discussion to a few, decidedly Western, decidedly modern artists, since a poet as exclusively a poet by profession didn't reallt exist until, say, some time in the late 19th century. Dryden is now primarily known as a critic and a playwright, though in his time his works, poetry and prose alike, were all part of his corpus as a 'poet', or at least as a man of letters. Schiller I know primarily through those works of his that were turned into songs, while Cowper was as popular a hymnodist as he was a plain poet. And, of course, no Ancient Greek author ever really had 'poet' as their sole 'profession', the dramatists for example had to act and direct (and were during their lifetimes probably more well known as such) at the same time, and *no* Greek poet, lyric or otherwise, could write verse without a tune.
In fact, I'd argue the distinction between 'playwright' and 'poet' we here make is manufactured, not just because many of these noted plays *are* poetry (like Homer's Iliad or Vergil's Aeneid is just a really long poem, and not anything approximating a novel), but because I think most people, when they think of at least Shakespeare, they don't just remember "Romeo and Juliet were teenaged lovers", but also "star-cross'd lovers" and "to be or not to be" -- that is, it's not just the plays as stories, settings, and characters they remember, which are elements shared by all plays prose or poetry, but it's also the plays as writing, in other words as how they are distinguished from the equally play-like, but certainly not poem-like, work of, say, Tennessee Williams. And, as many Asians as there are, the culture is not homogenous, and more people from all walks of life have been touched by the colonial/imperial ways of the West than the likes of Basho or Li Bai (which, ooh, I've actually read some of their stuff! Basho more so than the Chinese dude -- did you know that Basho didn't really write haiku, because haiku as such didn't exist in his time? he wasn't even the author to invent the distinction): Shakespeare or someone from the Bible (the Psalms are songs per se in the same way Pindar or the Homeric Hymns were songs -- aka, they're not, not even the Jews remember how they were originally sung; and King David, however legendary his biography, still has more of a biography than Homer or even Shakespeare, while having the archaeological evidence to back him up, and he is I think as known as a poet as he is a king, considering his psalms begin "A Psalm of David") are probably our best bets.
Finally, back to judgments: from what I understand, Whitman is the more popular poet than Tennyson, in the end, even in the English heart of the Anglosphere. It maybe that Tennyson's individual works are more popular, but Whitman, in his influencing the works of Eliot and Ginsberg and a lot of Hispanic authors, practically invented modern free verse, not to mention the way in which he shaped the American poetic idiom in a way Tennyson couldn't claim for the English.
Another questionable judgment is calling Shakespeare's plays rubbish, but this time both as literary and historical. The estimations of Shakespeare's work are variable, but two things in common are that his work is for the most part solid, and at least one or two of his plays manage to be, both in terms of being a play and in terms of being poetry, 'great'. But that's not what's being discussed. I think for a poet in this regard to be considered a 'poet' only by his profession as such terribly limits the discussion to a few, decidedly Western, decidedly modern artists, since a poet as exclusively a poet by profession didn't reallt exist until, say, some time in the late 19th century. Dryden is now primarily known as a critic and a playwright, though in his time his works, poetry and prose alike, were all part of his corpus as a 'poet', or at least as a man of letters. Schiller I know primarily through those works of his that were turned into songs, while Cowper was as popular a hymnodist as he was a plain poet. And, of course, no Ancient Greek author ever really had 'poet' as their sole 'profession', the dramatists for example had to act and direct (and were during their lifetimes probably more well known as such) at the same time, and *no* Greek poet, lyric or otherwise, could write verse without a tune.
In fact, I'd argue the distinction between 'playwright' and 'poet' we here make is manufactured, not just because many of these noted plays *are* poetry (like Homer's Iliad or Vergil's Aeneid is just a really long poem, and not anything approximating a novel), but because I think most people, when they think of at least Shakespeare, they don't just remember "Romeo and Juliet were teenaged lovers", but also "star-cross'd lovers" and "to be or not to be" -- that is, it's not just the plays as stories, settings, and characters they remember, which are elements shared by all plays prose or poetry, but it's also the plays as writing, in other words as how they are distinguished from the equally play-like, but certainly not poem-like, work of, say, Tennessee Williams. And, as many Asians as there are, the culture is not homogenous, and more people from all walks of life have been touched by the colonial/imperial ways of the West than the likes of Basho or Li Bai (which, ooh, I've actually read some of their stuff! Basho more so than the Chinese dude -- did you know that Basho didn't really write haiku, because haiku as such didn't exist in his time? he wasn't even the author to invent the distinction): Shakespeare or someone from the Bible (the Psalms are songs per se in the same way Pindar or the Homeric Hymns were songs -- aka, they're not, not even the Jews remember how they were originally sung; and King David, however legendary his biography, still has more of a biography than Homer or even Shakespeare, while having the archaeological evidence to back him up, and he is I think as known as a poet as he is a king, considering his psalms begin "A Psalm of David") are probably our best bets.
Finally, back to judgments: from what I understand, Whitman is the more popular poet than Tennyson, in the end, even in the English heart of the Anglosphere. It maybe that Tennyson's individual works are more popular, but Whitman, in his influencing the works of Eliot and Ginsberg and a lot of Hispanic authors, practically invented modern free verse, not to mention the way in which he shaped the American poetic idiom in a way Tennyson couldn't claim for the English.