>>25129088
Probably the guy that wrote his plays

>>25129088
Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, that's it.

We all love Sophocles, Chaucer, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Milton, Goethe, etc. but they're not in the same league.

>>25129115
Milton is better than Homer

Donald J. Trump

Dante, Milton, Blake, Joyce, Proust, Rabelais, maybe Tolstoy. Not that they are better, just that you could make an argument for them.

Better how? Better as in understanding the human soul? Tolstoy reaches the same heights through novels and novellas/short stories, but Shakespeare can nail it in a 10 line iambic pentameter poem.
Maybe Homer eclipses Shakespeare. I've heard Ancient Greek is extremely beautiful to read and is more expressive, but I can't read it.

>>25129088
Homer, Tolstoy clear. Many others you can make an argument for as well depending on your standards for what constitutes art.

>>25129088
J cole

>>25129163
Well that’s just it isn’t it? Take Hamlet, which is often considered the greatest work of literature ever, its very short in comparison to other pieces of literature that are too considered the greatest. He’s always been able to do more with less (even though I’ve liked not a one of his plots, ever)

His plays are very hard to get into though

I feel completely indifferent to discussions about which author is best, better, etc. Useless. Boring.

>>25129088
Lots of them.
It really all depends on your criteria.
Under strict classical, Aristotelian, Horatian criteria, Shakespeare is very full of faults and decidely inferior to many authors.
I suggest reading Tolstoy's essay on him, specially the discussion on King Lear, to see, for example, how Shakespeare's characters are not very natural at all, among other things, including observations on structure, language and a comparison with his (more classical) sources. Ignore Tolstoy's moralistic ramblings and focus on his technical critique. Aristotle would probably agree with many of those observations. So would Horace, Virgil and others, including myself to a large extent.
Yet under more Romantic and Baroque criteria, one's evaluation would change and even Shakespeare's faults will often be claimed to be a sign of his "spontaneity" and inborn genius.

Aesthetic judgment is ultimately subjective. It really depends on what your criteria are. One can outline major schools (classical, neoclassical, romantic, baroque, modern etc.) but you can' t really prove that the romantic or the baroque aesthetic is superior to the classical one and vice-versa. I think a lot of it comes to down to psychological tendencies and personal preferences, not to mention upbringing and the general zeitgeist.

>>25129088
Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton (Paradife Loft is better than anything Shakes has ever written, but Shakespeare has by far the better oeuvre), Goethe
>Blake, Joyce, Proust, Rabelais, maybe Tolstoy
Lol. Blake is an awful poet, and no novelist even comes close to Shakespeare's heights, apart from maybe Joyce in FW

Dante

Really it

JJ

>>25129408
Joe Jackson?

Now
The mist across the window hides the lines
But nothing hides the color of the lights that shine
Electricity so fine
Look and dry your eyes
We
So tired of all the darkness in our lives
With no more angry words to say
Can come alive
Get into a car and drive
To the other side
Me babe, steppin' out
Into the night
Into the light
You babe, steppin' out
Into the night
Into the light
We
Are young but getting old before our time
We'll leave the T.V. and the radio behind
Don't you wonder what we'll find
Steppin' out tonight
You
Can dress in pink and blue just like a child
And in a yellow taxi turn to me and smile
We'll be there in just a while
If you follow me
Me babe, steppin' out
Into the night
Into the light
You babe, steppin' out
Into the night
Into the light
Me babe, steppin' out
Into the night
Into the light
You babe, steppin' out
Into the night
Into the light
Me babe, steppin' out
Into the night
Into the light

Quite brilliant I agree.

>>25129345
>no novelist even comes close to Shakespeare's heights
NTA, but Anna Karenina, Ulysses and FW as you mentioned certainly do.
Agreed on Paradife Loft though, don’t agree on Blake being awful however; Jerusalem is simply amazing though not on the level of the other names mentioned in this thread.

>>25129088
GRRM

>>25129088
Gene Wolfe, Cormac McCarthy, GRRM, Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Arthur C Clarke, Frank Hebert, Fydor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, George Orwell.

>>25129613
also david foster wallace

John Milton, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and to a lesser extent Jane Austen.

>>25129965
I agree with Milton, I can sort of understand Joyce/Pynchon, but fucking Austen?

>>25129975
Yes, she's definitely up there to a lesser extent.

>>25129088
A lot, but the argument better be compelling. There is no definite one "da greatest ever!!1" and if you think so, you're a video game brained retard.

>>25129982
Most people here think like that however…

>>25129120
Bait
>>25129115
Milton is shit

>>25130087
Needs GRRM, Vonnegut, Stephen King, Sanderson, that ready player one book, Ellison. Expand upon it

>>25130092
You don't understand manchild-core lit and the people who read it.
The authors you listed are normie genre authors. Manchild Core Authors despise them. Manchild-Core is masculine-oriented genre slop that's slightly better than shit like sanderson and airport reading material so it allows midwit manchildren who want to appear literary, cultured and intelligent to appear so without putting the effort into reading difficult material.
if you're a manchild who can't read poetry or literature written before the year 1900 then you'll flock to shit like wolfe and mccarthy and tolkien because it's like your favorite dark souls vidya or warhammer slop and uses babby's first literary techniques like unreliable narrator and lets you feel like you're a based intellectual. It's why subhumans on 4chan read it so much.
>Oooooh... what's this? A book written in the last 50 years that has blood and gore and violence and esotericism?
>I'm literally so deep and intellectual, under my incel veneer I can enchant any woman if only they got to know me and my dark triad jungian nietzchean based tradcath traditionalist spirit
>btw i act like patrick bateman despite being 290 lbs but its ok because sam hyde does it and he's my idol and totally not a loser

>>25130154
Naruhodo… yeah but still, I feel GRRM applies? I don’t know, never read anything by him but doesn’t he have gore and sex in his slop? Or is it not as literarily pretentious? But it looks like American Psycho or Fight Club would both definitely fit into this.

>>25130154
McCarthyfags are annoying. If you love his writing so much as you claim and not just the dumb cowboy plot then read Faulkner, but they won’t, will they?

>>25129088
I only put Homer, Petrarch, and Schiller on the same level personally.

>>25130154
I have a feeling you don't actually read much of anything. It's hard to imagine someone as shamelessly spiteful and reductive as you truly grasping anything of soulful value

>>25129975
Austen's the one that you're up in arms over? Not ERB?

>>25130154

neat

>>25130213
Stop projecting your illiteracy, Manchild.

>>25130154
I don't say this often, but you need to have sex.