I'm assuming the OP is just taking the piss out of all of us with this thread. They have to be, right? It's just too rich to think otherwise.
Shakespeare's great. I had a dissertation chapter on him, I've presented at conferences on him, I have a publication on him, and I teach him regularly to my university students -- as recently as two weeks ago, in fact, and indeed, I did teach Sonnet 18. Funny thing about that sonnet in particular: if the subject of the poem was a real person (a dubious proposition, but still...), then we have absolutely no idea who he (or she) was, which gives the lie to the idea that Shakespeare would immortalize him/her with his words. He immortalizes his own impression of the object of affection, but no details are given. There's a parallel there to the OP's own ostensible worries about posterity...
But here's the thing. Milton's great too. And Dickinson. And Keats. And all the others mentioned by Christine, Susan, and others in this thread. I was teaching Marvell's "A Horatian Ode" today, and asked my students to give a definition of an ode. When they did, I mentioned that odes were often to people, but I rattled off a few other odes to animals and objects. One of my students literally squealed when I mentioned "Ode on a Grecian Urn," as it turned out that she absolutely loves the poem. Beauty is truth indeed! My point is that it really doesn't matter if Shakespeare is the "best," because that's an utterly foolish metric. Some days I turn to Shakespeare, some days I turn to Auden, others I turn to Herbert, Betjeman, Robinson, or any number of others...because we have a big ol' canon full of brilliant men and women of words, and an even bigger assortment of non-canonical work that is brilliant in the eyes of many, many individuals too. If there were a billion poets out there, with most of them loved by two or three, that's still something incredible for the two or three readers (and likely for the poet).
In other words, who cares if Shakespeare is considered the pinnacle? It literally doesn't matter. Let academics write articles about it and debate the finer points of who is responsible for the order of the 1609 Quarto, or whether the "young man" and "dark lady" were real people. Just write and share your own damn poetry and let posterity take care of itself.
|