Who is the Most Famous Poet Ever?

[busker]

you're right busker, on everything you speak of. bill didn't invent a language just words. like all the ones tolstoy inserted into his russian dictionary.  your right about the language back then evolving. it's stopped evolving now and no new words are ever added to it. language is its very self a dynamic entity and to see it as evolving then but not now seems a little crass. and yes. you're right ; "If a modern day TV writer opened a story like bill did, he wouldn't get very far." and yet so many of his tragedies have been done in the modern idiom... what were thinking.  of course you're presuming a tv writer can write as well as bill. which, i'm sure they can they have thousands of works behind their names to count on do't they. NO
of course he wrote different then that we do now so did tolstoy for fuck sake. and yes bill is taught in schools world wide, even china. so is tolstoy but of course not to the same extent most people who've read tolstoy could quote a line from him because he's not fucking memorable enough anna fuckin karinina...please give me a break; war and peace arguably the greatest novel ever wrote, and tolstoy has the temerity to say  "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle." no tolstoy felt it was more a work of fucking art  it was a novel. not a novel novel considering his upbringing and royal connections, everyone who owned a palace new about  the french invasion of russia.  i'll go as far as to to say tolstoy as a literary master was not fit to lick the shit off bill's toecap. as for bill being taught throughout the educational systems of the world; i wonder why the fuck that is? could it be because he's the worst dramatist on the planet? could it be that they all think so highly of tolstoy which has been transalted to the english, they decide unanimously to go with bill. even in moscow i'm presuming. as literary giants go, tolsry probably comes up to the height of bill's dick, as such i find and see his vilification of lear as schlong envy. crits, people like bill shit them out for breakfast, they don't sit broken hearted because can't attain the same heady heights.

anyway. who else do you love beside tolstoy...

i've always though of kipling as a poet/writer of the people.

I think it was EM Forster in his Aspects of the Novel who said that the greatness of English literature lies in its poetry, including the blank verse of Shakespeare. I concur. 
It is strange, because English for the most parts has words ending in consonants, which isn't particularly poetic, but English poetry is in a different league than the poetry of other languages I am familiar with. 
Ergo, a number of English poets would be amongst my favourites, with TS Eliot perhaps being at the top.

I never understood Kipling's popularity. Now some bigots, such as Wagner, are so great as to transcend their bigotry, but Kipling was a bigot and a hack,  a writer of utter tripe (read 'The Phantom Rickshaw and other stories').

I never quite got the hang of Tolstoy, much preferring Dostoevsky.

None of them hold a candle to Agatha Christie, of course...