Who is the Most Famous Poet Ever?

[RiverNotch]

I think Vyasa and Mohammed are also fair bets. And if you think his comedies are best, then that keeps him up as a great playwright -- Dr Johnson also thought his comedies were best, also found the ending of Hamelt iffy, etc, but he wouldn't deny the greatness of Hamlet the character, or Lear the wretch, or Falstaff the comic hero, etc etc.

[NobodyNothing]

So now we're so foolishly bold as to exclaim that Shakespeare's tragedies are overrated? LOL Leave it to the internet.

[busker]

So now we're so foolishly bold as to exclaim that Shakespeare's tragedies are overrated?  LOL  Leave it to the internet.

Yes, the internet and also Leo Tolstoy, Legoius and Cazamian, and Bernard Shaw, amongst others.
If you don't have the education to form a considered opinion of your own, perhaps stay out of debates with people you don't know and who could be knowing quite a bit more than yourself?

[billy]

less of the sniping remarks, any member here can take part in any discussion without being attacked. whether shakespeare's tragedies were overrated or not is a subjective view. no one here is better than anyone else and no one here knows how well informed anyone else is. just because tolstoy and a few others agree with your viewpoint doesn't make that viewpoint correct.

here's my subjective view. while some famous writers think the tragedies a bucket of shite, i suspect they're outweighed by others more informed than them who actually laud them. to dismiss his works as overrated sounds a little trite. there's also a large smell of jealousy in there and critics like cazamian have themselves been vilified and ridiculed for some of his views. i'm sure tolstoy was speaking of only one of the tragedies, [king lear] and not all of them. of course Orwell is small fry with innate largesse of his own but he did make one compelling comment about gauging good from bad;

In conclusion, Orwell mentions how little difference Tolstoy's thunderous attack on Shakespeare has made. According to Orwell, the only criterion for the merit of a work of art is that it continues to be admired, and hence, the verdict on Shakespeare must be "not guilty", since more than a hundred years after Tolstoy's pamphlet Shakespeare remains as admired as ever.



here an excerpt by orwell on tolstoy and Lear:

Orwell analyzes Tolstoy's criticism of Shakespeare's work in general and his attack on King Lear in particular. According to Orwell's detailed summary, Tolstoy denounced Shakespeare as a bad dramatist, not a true artist at all, and declared that Shakespeare's fame was due to propaganda by German professors towards the end of the eighteenth century. Tolstoy claimed that Shakespeare was still admired only because of a sort of mass hypnosis or "epidemic suggestion".

After having recapitulated Tolstoy's indictment and Tolstoy's criteria for literary merit, which Shakespeare does not meet, Orwell writes:
“ One's first feeling is that in describing Shakespeare as a bad writer he is saying something demonstrably untrue. But this is not the case. In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is 'good' ... Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion. Artistic theories such as Tolstoy's are quite worthless, because they not only start out with arbitrary assumptions, but depend on vague terms ('sincere', 'important' and so forth) which can be interpreted in any way one chooses. Properly speaking one cannot answer Tolstoy's attack. The interesting question is: why did he make it? But it should be noticed in passing that he uses many weak or dishonest arguments. Some of them are worth pointing out, not because they invalidate his main charge but because they are, so to speak, evidence of malice. ”

After a detailed, itemized analysis aimed to show that a great number of Tolstoy's arguments are false, dishonest and malicious, Orwell identifies Tolstoy's chief quarrel with Shakespeare as "the quarrel between the religious and the humanist attitude towards life." The exuberance with life that characterizes Shakespeare, his interest in everything, the poetic brilliance - the very qualities for which people tend to admire Shakespeare - are precisely the qualities that make him unendurable to Tolstoy, who preached austerity and whose "main aim, in his later years, was to narrow the range of human consciousness. One's interests, one's points of attachment to the physical world and the day-to-day struggle, must be as few and not as many as possible." Since Shakespeare's attitude to life threatens Tolstoy's, Tolstoy is incapable of enjoying Shakespeare and mounts an assault on him in order to try to ensure that others cannot enjoy him either.

Orwell then proceeds to examine Tolstoy himself and notes that the special hatred Tolstoy reserved for King Lear could well be due to the curious similarity of his own story to Lear's, and to the fact that he suffered disappointments of the same nature after renouncing his estate, his aristocratic title and his copyrights.

In conclusion, Orwell mentions how little difference Tolstoy's thunderous attack on Shakespeare has made. According to Orwell, the only criterion for the merit of a work of art is that it continues to be admired, and hence, the verdict on Shakespeare must be "not guilty", since more than a hundred years after Tolstoy's pamphlet Shakespeare remains as admired as ever.

So now we're so foolishly bold as to exclaim that Shakespeare's tragedies are overrated?  LOL  Leave it to the internet.

Yes, the internet and also Leo Tolstoy, Legoius and Cazamian, and Bernard Shaw, amongst others.
If you don't have the education to form a considered opinion of your own, perhaps stay out of debates with people better informed than yourself?

[busker]

Tolstoy found the plots contrived, which is a perfectly valid point.
Tolstoy was reading the plays translated, so he could not form a full opinion on their literary merit, only how they stood up as plays. Orwell’s “defence” similarly has a hint of hurt English language pride.
That Shakespeare is read today is a bogus contention, because much of that reading is through a self perpetuating education system where Shakespeare is already held up as the nonpareil, no questions asked.

[billy]

Tolstoy found the plots contrived, which is a perfectly valid point.
yes it is as it is also a valid point to say the plots are not contrived as many attest.

Tolstoy was reading the plays translated, so he could not form a full opinion on their literary merit, only how they stood up as plays.
if he could not form a full opinion on their literary merit, how could he hope to see how they stood up as plays?
Orwell’s “defence” similarly has a hint of hurt English language pride. actually Orwell's defence was that there was no defence, tolstoy was just being subjective and was controlled to say what he did because of his upbringing and ideals. Orwell also went on to say ones fame can't be measured by someone attacking or praising but by how well it or they stand the test of time. i'd say shakespeare stood it better than most.
That Shakespeare is read today is a bogus contention, because much of that reading is through a self perpetuating education system where Shakespeare is already held up as the nonpareil, no questions asked. as was more so in is own time, back then his plays were watched more than read; many were too illiterate to read. now shakespeare and others are universally discussed as to how good they are compared to other poets through the ages. for some silly reason most people put shakespeare as pretty good. more people have probably been to a shakespeare tragedy than would have ever read a book by tolstoy. what does that say about tolstoy in comparison? i'm also sure at school and college level tolstoy is mostly only read because it's on the curriculum. shakespear isn't and has never been the only classical writer taught, yet almost every countries population knows of him. moreso that tolstoy who some confuse with a song title. the big thing is this, to get our point/view across we don't need to try and belittle others. i have no formal education and yet here i am, conversing with someone who is arguably well enough educated to have an informed opininion of their own. for some reason i think i'm showing formal education only works if it works. your arguments are flawed and without proof when you say shakespeare is overrated. what you mean is "you think he's overrated" there are millions more who think you wrong you only have to look on bookshelves.

[busker]

^^ there is no right or wrong answer here, we can only put forward arguments supporting our views. Shakespeare’s greatness is not an objective truth like the height of Mt Everest.

But on the matter of belittling, Nobodynothing made a rather insulting statement and got the resposns he deserved and was perhaps angling for. Ist ed, he started it.
Hope that clarifies.

Will carry on the discussion in a separate post

[billy]

i agree, it's subjective. back to the question at hand. i think it's hard for the modern poets to compete because the oldies had generations following them. that said, if it's a given generation i think people like emily bishop stand a chance. Tennyson is a poet i know of through the charge of the light brigade but i'm not sure he's the most famous. while homer's iiliad is famous, i'm not sure that many people have actually read it. same with dante's inferno. i think these are more commonly known by more intellectual readers of which i can't profess to be. i'm more a gunga din man, Kipling we prolific and well known for more than one genre of poetry. some of his ballads are excellent.

[busker]

Back to Shakespeare: Orwell’s polemic on Tolstoy does not address his objections to Shakespeare at all, but essentially says “Shakespeare was great and Tolstoy was wrong because English canon”
Don’t take my word for it.
Tolstoy: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27726/27...7726-h.htm
Orwell: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf

---

In one part of his essay, Tolstoy points out how the original King Leir had a motive for treating his daughters differently where Shakespeare’s King Lear lacked one that was even nominally credible.
Tolstoy’s main objection was that none of Shakespeare’s characters act in a plausible manner. One other point is that the jokes are terrible, but as Shakespeare was writing for a largely illiterate audience as well, it is understandable that there are elements of Bollywood drama and dialogue  in his work.
I personally never understood the adulation that King Lear received. Othello is powerful as drama, but King Lear has a lot of unnatural situations and overblown dialogue.

[billy]

and yet iit still receives critical acclaim with a myriad of stage actors lining up to play in it. tolstoy was one of a few with a completely different mindset than the man in the street. he saw in lear too much of a comparison to his own life. he didn't like how HE was portrayed. i think we can agree that in literature, specially the english type, orwell is just as able to comment on lear as tolstoy is.

you said yourself that;
Tolstoy was reading the plays translated, so he could not form a full opinion on their literary merit, only how they stood up as plays.

how could he by your own volition form an opinion as to how it stood up as a play [what the plot was like] if he could not form a full opinion as to their literary merit? you can't have the cake and eat it. basically if he's failing at the literary level of translation all he know is the with any certainty is the plays format. act1 scene# etc a fomat universally used. lets also remember as orwell so graciously stated they came from diverse backgrounds. one writing for the mainstream and 1 for the uppercases of europe. many of which didn't bother to read him. sorry but i have to stand with orwell on this one. we can only measure the fame of a piece of art by how well it stands the test of time. it seem if we look at the numbers tolstoy comes in a slow 2nd. on that basis alone i would question tolstoys liquidity as shakespeares main critic of abhorrence and vitriol.

[RiverNotch]

There are two versions of Lear, btw: the old one with a lot of extraneous and inconsistent bits of dialogue, and the one Shakespeare himself provided for a more literary audience. I don't mind 'unnatural situations' (I'm guessing the storm is your prime example, as well as all the things with Gloucester) because realism should *not* be the be-all end-all of drama, while overblown dialogue I think is more a matter of taste -- the 'bigness' of its dialogue, and whether it's a touch too big to be tasteful, is for the individual reader to judge, but I'd venture to say that the reader who either misses or ignores the emotional impact, not only of the events but of the dialogue through which those events are conveyed, is a bit of a fool.

I do sort of agree that it's a touch overblown, but more in the sense of its dialogue than the situations or the play as a whole -- reading it, I'm sometimes exhausted, not just by all the emotions it induces in me, but also by Shakespeare's style. Here I am, preferring the far juicier dialogue of Hamlet, the brutal force of Macbeth, or the high strangeness of Troilus. If anything, I think those three tragedies make it to greatness, Macbeth for developing the nihilist archetype, Hamlet for giving birth to psychoanalytic intelligence, and for Troilus for being a sharp imitation of the encyclopedic nature of life.

[busker]

how could he by your own volition form an opinion as to how it stood up as a play [what the plot was like] if he could not form a full opinion as to their literary merit?

How could he form an opinion on the plays without reading them in the original?
Drama translates; poetry does not.
Ibsen was a major influence on 20th century English language dramatists including Miller and Tennessee Williams. Did they read him in the original? I think not.
Look at Tolstoy's specific point about the opening scene of King Lear:

...the reader, or spectator, can not conceive that a King, however old and stupid he may be, could believe the words of the vicious daughters, with whom he had passed his whole life, and not believe his favorite daughter, but curse and banish her; and therefore the spectator, or reader, can not share the feelings of the persons participating in this unnatural scene....

which is on the money, corresponding as it does to the King's outburst, which he alludes to specifically:

The barbarous Scythian,

Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and relieved,
As thou my sometime daughter.

Tolstoy points out later on in the essay, that in the old King Leir, the King's anger had a more rational cause, i.e. his plan was all along to get Cordelia betrothed to a suitor of his choice, and her smart ass answer spoiled it:

In the older drama, Leir abdicates because, having become a widower, he thinks only of saving his soul. He asks his daughters as to their love for him—that, by means of a certain device he has invented, he may retain his favorite daughter on his island. The elder daughters are betrothed, while the youngest does not wish to contract a loveless union with any of the neighboring suitors whom Leir proposes to her, and he is afraid that she may marry some distant potentate.

The device which he has invented, as he informs his courtier, Perillus (Shakespeare's Kent), is this, that when Cordelia tells him that she loves him more than any one or as much as her elder sisters do, he will tell her that she must, in proof of her love, marry the prince he will indicate on his island. All these motives for Lear's conduct are absent in Shakespeare's play. 

Elsewhere in the essay he points out specific instances of what he thinks is wrong with the play, and he provides evidence in support of his arguments. Of course, it is subjective at the end of the day as to whether a passage is 'natural' or not, but the point is that unlike Orwell, Tolstoy doesn't engage in emotional appeals to authority (or popularity). 

Clarification on translation
To be clear, Tolstoy wrote:
...I several times recommenced reading Shakespeare in every possible form, in Russian, in English, in German and in Schlegel's translation, as I was advised....

I take this to mean that he read a simplified English version in addition to the translations, because if we could read the original, he wouldn't read the German and Russian renderings.

The cult of Shakespeare
More on this later. Need to take the dog out for a walk.

BILLY
do you want to move this part of the discussion to a separate thread?

[billy]

you stated he could not form a full opinion on their literary merit and now you say drama can be translated? what is it, can it be or can it not be.

and no i've viced my opinion that tolstoy is a hack and shakespeare is much more famous. this is my opinion. itried to change the subject once and get back to the thread but you're staling me

[busker]

you stated he could not form a full opinion on their literary merit and now you say drama can be translated? what is it, can it be  or can it not be.

and no i've viced my opinion that tolstoy is a hack and shakespeare is much more famous. this is my opinion. itried to change the subject once and get back to the thread but you're staling me

The literary merit of Shakespeare is entirely in his situational poetry.
His drama is in blank verse, unlike modern drama
Tolstoy could not have been in a position to form a full opinion of Shakespere’s merit because he could not have read his poetry in the original. He was, however, capable of forming an opinion on Shakespeare’s worth as a dramatist. The arguments he propounded were rational, and he did not resort to arbitrary name calling!
Your view that Shakespeare is more famous is a biased, English language centric point of view. Pushkin is the most famous poet in Russia, and Goethe in Germany. Dante is more famous than Shakespeare in Italy, Iqbal and Ghalib more famous in Pakistan. Shakespeare is one of the big names in world literature, and not the pre eminence that English speakers think he is.

At any rate, my original contention was that Shakespeare was a great poet and a great writer of comedies. That’s because his genius lay in the use of imagistic language, not in realistic story telling. The ending of Hamlet, the ending of Romeo and Juliet, the beginning of Lear, and the second half of Measure for Measure are hopelessly unrealistic or anticlimactic. These make the willing suspension of disbelief difficult.
Othello was a tight knit well paced play and so was Macbeth, the latter because it was based on Holinshed’s history and the plot was supplied readily.
When Shakespeare had to improvise on a story the end result was disappointing. His Roman tragedies worked because the story couldn’t be changed. The comedies worked because realism was irrelevant.

[billy]

i say again, this is what you wrote.

Tolstoy was reading the plays translated, so he could not form a full opinion on their literary merit, only how they stood up as plays.

we're talking about literary merit here.  and how good lear was.  to say shakespeares literary merit was only in his poetry is like saying picasso's artistic talent is only to be found in hist cubism works. sorry but it doesn't make sense. if tolstoy can't understand a translational properly then he can't understand it from a play or a poem.  no matter what you say or show will not change my mind to say he could only know how they stood up as plays without being able to understand their literary merit doesn't work. any art is measured by it's content. not by canvass it's painted on. that's my final post on this matter. you may post as you wish but it will not make you statement work.


Tolstoy was reading the plays translated, so he could not form a full opinion on their literary merit, only how they stood up as plays. bad actors do not a good play make, not because there is a lack of literary merit, but because there is a lack of proficient acting.

i think we can agree that lear enfolds and is rich in poetry. if tolstoy could not form a full opinion on them, then how can he rate the play?

my problem also resides in the fact that while tolstoy and his cohorts castigate shakespear, many many more non english poets and playwrights think he's the bee's knees. so therefore who am i to believe, you and tolstoy [who cant understand translations from english] or millions of readers and critics world-wide who think him one of the best playwrights since sliced bread? i think i follow the current on this one.  i have read tolstoy's "war and peace" and everyone has seen anna karinina through film but to see king leer in theatre played by lawrence olivier or john gielgud was much more breathtaking. the difference between tolstoy and bill is that bill is a man of the people; tolstoy a count, he never stood a chance in this two horse race.

none of bill's play were based on reality. most of them were borrowed or stolen from others. lear was written of before shakespeare wrote it. drama does not have to be a receptacle for truth.

i copied and pasted the following and they are not my own words:

Drama is also a type of a play written for theater, television, radio, and film. In simple words, a drama is a composition in verse or prose presenting a story in pantomime or dialogue. It contains conflict of characters, particularly the ones who perform in front of audience on the stage. it has to be applauded to be famous, it doesn't have to be real or even realistic.

[NobodyNothing]

Influence.  The Shakespearean tree of influence is so vast and profound as to be incalculable.  No matter where you look in the literary and dramatic arts you find Shakespeare.  He's almost omnipresent.  Titanic.  Romeo and Juliet on a sinking ship.  You can almost directly trace the modern TV sitcom back to Shakespeare in plays like As You Like It.  He was the literary and dramatic cartographer of the modern mind and sensibility.  Freud long before Freud.  A secular god in this way.  Shakespeare is smarter and more talented than us all.  The man and artist came as close to artistically subsuming and representing the vast dimensions of the human soul than anyone who came before or after him.  As one Shakespearean scholar once remarked, Shakespeare is everyone and no one. 

This is before you even get into the mind-boggling extravagance of his sheer literary talent.  The guy turned phrases of glittering gold seemingly as easy as putting one foot in front of the other.

I once thought to myself has there ever been anyone in any discipline who has achieved more and been more influential than Shakespeare?  There's only a small handful that come to mind, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Aristotle...it's a short list when you really think about it.

That South Park episode comes to mind when thinking about Shakespeare, that episode where Butters' sidekick exclaims over and over to him "the Simpson's did it" when Butters keeps trying to come up with some new plot that their characters can employ in their quest for some kind of devious originality. You can almost fill in the phrase "Shakespeare did it" in its place.

Anyway...

[busker]

Influence.  The Shakespearean tree of influence is so vast and profound as to be incalculable.  No matter where you look in the literary and dramatic arts you find Shakespeare.  He's almost omnipresent.  Titanic.  Romeo and Juliet on a sinking ship.  You can almost directly trace the modern TV sitcom back to Shakespeare in plays like As You Like It.  He was the literary and dramatic cartographer of the modern mind and sensibility.  Freud long before Freud.  A secular god in this way.  Shakespeare is smarter and more talented than us all.  The man and artist came as close to artistically subsuming and representing the vast dimensions of the human soul than anyone who came before or after him.  As one Shakespearean scholar once remarked, Shakespeare is everyone and no one. 

This is before you even get into the mind-boggling extravagance of his sheer literary talent.  The guy turned phrases of glittering gold seemingly as easy as putting one foot in front of the other.

I once thought to myself has there ever been anyone in any discipline who has achieved more and been more influential than Shakespeare?  There's only a small handful that come to mind, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Aristotle...it's a short list when you really think about it.

That South Park episode comes to mind when thinking about Shakespeare, that episode where Butters' sidekick exclaims over and over to him "the Simpson's did it" when Butters keeps trying to come up with some new plot that their characters can employ in their quest for some kind of devious originality.  You can almost fill in the phrase "Shakespeare did it" in its place.

Anyway...

Obviously, the founders of a culture influence everything that come after them and Shakespeare plays that role in the English speaking world. Homer has a similar influence - actually, greater, since his straddles all of Europe, not just its English speaking end Virgil less than Homer but more than Shakespeare since Virgil strongly influenced Inferno (not just by being there as Dante’s guide, but in such details as the description of the underworld and the passage of souls across Acheron), and Dante influenced all of Italian literature including Petrarch and Petrarch was the father of the sonnet, ad infinitum. If you think that Shakespeare and Aristotle, or Newton, had the same impact on the world, then you need to get out of your English speaking bubble

[billy]

what the scientists did for science, bill did for english language, a language that covers a large part of the globe. it's a fair comparison.

here's a cut and past, the article is much longer but i can't be arsed doing it all or source it other than to google "what did Shakespeare do for us" ;
note the phrases "world's pre-eminent dramatist" and "other languages" the man added around 1,700 new words to the language we speak. i'd say that's pretty fuckin awesome


Shakespeare's influence extends from theatre and literature to present-day movies, Western philosophy, and the English language itself. William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the history of the English language,[1] and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.[2][3][4] He transformed European theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through innovation in characterization, plot, language and genre.[5][6][7] Shakespeare's writings have also impacted a large number of notable novelists and poets over the years, including Herman Melville[8] Charles Dickens,[9] and Maya Angelou,[10] and continue to influence new authors even today. Shakespeare is the most quoted writer in the history of the English-speaking world[11][12] after the various writers of the Bible; many of his quotations and neologisms have passed into everyday usage in English and other languages.

[NobodyNothing]

Freud coined the term "penis envy".  In the literary and dramatic arts, one might re-phrase the term as "Shakespeare envy", as no other writer casts a longer, more encompassing shadow than he.  I recall the eminent literary scholar Harold Bloom's term "the anxiety of influence" when referring to artists attempting to escape beyond the shadows of those predecessors who influenced them the most in their artistic viewpoint and stylistic endeavors.  It's hard to be original and talentedly so in this way.  It's a beautiful and sometimes culturally earth shaking thing when it happens.  Pushing the ball further.  Artistic thunderbolts. The momentous achievement of true and lasting cultural relevancy.  

Shakespeare just happens to be the giant amongst all giants in this literary and dramatic way.  Just the way it happened. Just the way it is.

[rowens]

I'm drunk. And so shouldn't say anything. When I wake up tomorrow, after hours obsessing about the woman I'm in love with, I'm going to be suicidally embarrassed about this.

And I had to start a new paragraph.

Absorb. Secrete. Digest. Circulate. Excrete. Create.

And Ignorance with a capital I. That's all I know.

---

I enjoy discussing Harold Bloom's views on Celine, Carl Jung and Strindberg. Because Bloom is such a force. But when it comes to these figures, he admits, as we all do, his bias.