Quote:
Originally Posted by N. Matheson
Then what about verse or poetry in general? Who would you rank the highest?
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Nobody. Even with my comments above about Shakespeare perhaps being the "greatest playwright of all time," I frankly think that ranking artists of any kind is pointless. To do so, we would first need to come up with a widely agreed upon set of criteria, which would be challenging enough on its own. What constitutes "greatest"? The most enduring impact? How often the poet has been republished? How many translations there have been? How many people have shed tears over the words, or been driven to laughter, or been inspired to social change? Does name recognition equal greatness? Mastery of form or language? None of those things are really objective measures, and by that same token, none really get into what makes poetry (indeed, art)
meaningful...which is to say the personal connection. Sure, some lovers of poetry will absolutely adore poets/poems for any of those ad-hoc criteria above, but art isn't like a sport where you can make a convincing argument that the highest point-earner is clearly the GOAT. Instead, it's better to just like what you like and not care about its relative merits according to some nebulous, indefinite criteria.
For me, Auden has been my "favorite" poet since I was 17. I could rattle off all the reasons why I personally love Auden's poetry, but none of them should really matter to anyone else because it's not
about anyone else. I would rank Auden the highest among poets...to me. But I would never dream of trying to impose that personal ranking on others, or making some nonsensical claim that because I love Auden, he is somehow objectively "the greatest" poet. And if I'm being honest, even "favorite" doesn't quite do art justice. I recall as an undergraduate asking my old, curmudgeonly Shakespeare professor what his favorite Shakespeare play was. He scowled a bit at the question and couldn't really answer -- he found some aspects of one play intellectually gratifying, and some aspects of some other play productive for his research etc., but he couldn't just say "Oh,
King Lear is my favorite" or "I just love
Measure for Measure." Having a "favorite" wasn't really a metric he'd ever considered. And that, too, is perfectly fine! We all approach art in our own ways, and one of the great things about any of the arts is that we can spend all the time we want talking about objective measures of greatness (or mastery, given this forum), but the subjective, personal experience of what resonates, and why --
that is what matters most, in my view.
Edited to add: cross-posted with Clive who said much the same thing.