I don't think it helps to see poetry as a hierarchy with Shakespeare or whoever on top. I'm not naïve though and I have observed that the structure of the poetry community is more hierarchical than many other types of art or literature.
Perhaps you could set an alternative target? Why not aim to be the best worst poet? The one who finally sinks below William McGonagall on the bottom rung.
Orwell wrote about good bad poetry in his Rudyard Kipling essay:
Quote:
At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’, Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as:
For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,
‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’
and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as ‘Felix Randal’ or ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ are poetry. One can, perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily […] if one describes him simply as a good bad poet.
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Betjemen and Tennyson wrote good bad poetry too apparently.