[Rex Coleridge]

Yeats or Keats who is the better poet?

[Tim Murphy]

Keats was fabulously talented, but Yeats is the greater poet. He lived to a ripe old age and playing so central a role in his country, he just had a lot more life experience to impart. And of course King Billy left us a far larger body of work.

[Michael Cantor]

Keats had the quick bat and was a better fielder, but Yeats could hit for power and, as Tommy Eliot said, he came to play.

In other words, ridiculous questions deserve ridiculous answers.

[R.A. Briggs]

Meh. What has either of them written lately?

[Roger Slater]

Fair question, given that their last names differ only by a single question.

[Jesse Anger]

Nice one, Roger. What does when have to do with which, Rachael? It's Yeats by a long measure of mummy cloth if you ask me.

[Tim Murphy]

Great answer, Jesse!

[Andrew Sacks]

Michael has a point, though it is perhaps overstated in the word "ridiculous." But I must agree with him in principle: one does not rank poets as a Hit Parade ranks Top 40 songs. Yet, at the risk of opening a can of worms:

If we take out Shakespeare (as primarily a dramatist, though perhaps really the greatest English poet of them all), we start with Milton at the top (whether or not we can dance to Paradise Lost), and I see a rather amorphous and challenging level just below--I would include both Keats and Yeats in it.

[John Whitworth]

Yeats is good but Keats is better. Now who is the better, Marvell or Donne?

[Simon Hunt]

As Michael points out, there's not much reason to make such a comparison (except the fun that's in it). Because their names are a bit similar? Wordsworth over Wadsworth! Sappho over S. Plath(o)!

As to this one, I recognize the greatness of Yeats, yes, but I'm a Keats man, and here's my best argument for my side: what would we say of Yeats if the consumption had consumed him at 25?

Buddy Holly or Richie Valens?