If Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer, in no specific order, are the incontestable greatest poets in the English language, who is the fourth greatest? Spenser? Donne? Wordsworth? Eliot?
>>25307440William Langland and the Pearl/Gawain poet should probably be in the conversation, though I would have said Spenser. Tennyson, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Browning are all also very worthy contenders.
Eliot.
>>25307440JonesBut the Saesneggers aren't ready for that
>>25307586imo dryden is a better poet than any of the romantics.
Gray, Spenser or Scott
>>25307440>>25307586>Chaucer>William Langland>Gawain PoetI don't think it's right to call them the greatest poets in the English language when they require translators' notes to be understood by even well-read English speakers. They might be the greatest English poets, but if we're talking about poets who wrote in English, I would place Coleridge in third and Woodsworth in fourth.
>>25307596It’s funny you say that because my copy of in parenthesis just arrived. Very much looking forward to it, as Welshman particularly.
>>25307957I'm baiting a bit but he is extraordinary, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
>>25307928By this standard Homer can hardly contend for being among the best poets of the Greek language
>>25307968It's not an uncontroversial opinion that Ancient Greek literature and Modern Greek literature are two very different things. I wouldn't consider Beowulf one of the great works of English poetry either.
>>25307928Middle English is extremely close to Modern English. Most sentences are perfectly intelligible to us:>Within a while this John the Clerk up leap>And on this goode wife laid on full sore;>So merry a fit had she not had full yore.>He pricked hard and deep, as he were mad.
>>25307440lord byrone(pbuh)
>>25308075Some people are just allergic to thorne, eth, and wynn
>>25307440Pope
>>25307998then Eliot shouldn't count imo
>>25308075Why isn't there an edition of the Canterbury Tales with modern spelling?
>>25307440Rupi Kaur>Junot Diaz>Ta-Nehisi Coates>>>>>>>old white dead racist drivel
>>25308075>>25308090Disingenuous cherry picking
>>25307440Pound
>>25307785I feel like Dryden is sort of like Nabokov in that he has a mastery of words, but those words lack any soulful evocation behind them. I haven't read much poetry desu but for me Eliot and Whitman are nice.
>>25308091The only correct answer.
>>25308176Most of the confusion just comes from the spelling, pronunciation and a slightly different meaning, not the actually obsolete words. For example, in the first stanza of the Canterbury Tales, there's only about five words that are obsolete, and one of them, 'eke', is technically not obsolete because of its use in the phrase 'eke out'. In the second stanza, I think there's only one. It takes little time to get used.
>>25307440Gerard Manley Hopkins. I dare you to find a poem that uses the English language as boldly and joyously as "The Windhover." He truly knew that poetry was painting with spoken sound.
>>25307440Wordsworth
>>25307440Probably Eliot or Pope. There isn't really a fourth though. Honestly, even Milton is maybe a half-tier below Shakespeare.>>25307586>>25308087>>25308360None of the Romantics are individually impressive enough to be in a tier with Shakespeare and Milton, though as a "movement" they do mog other "movements" like the metaphysical poets or the Elizabethan dramatists.
>>25308266I just think you're totally wrong. In my experience people who argue what you do always just talk about Canterbury tales with such dunningkruger about middle English
>>25308522Yes he's good, and he has multiple important non-satirical works.
>>25308360>>25308510Incorrect. Gray or Spenser with Scott as a runner up. Wordsworth and Pope are vastly inferior when compared.
>>25307968nobody cares about modern greek, nor do they read it
>>25308562In what way? Wordsworth debunked Gray at the least
>>25308704Wordsworth is babby's first poet
>>25307440>If Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer, in no specific order, are the incontestable greatest poets in the English language>If>incontestable"60% of the time it works 100% of the time".That aside, and accepting your Holy Trinity for the sake of argument, there’s certainly no single figure clearly below those but clearly above everyone else. Nor should you expect there to be.A better question:Suppose we want to pick a bunch of poets for our "second tier". How many (and who) would that have to be, so that only a small minority of people (say, 10%) think that someone we left out is better than any of the ones we picked? Not just "I think X should be on the list", but "I think X, whom you omitted entirely, should be TOP of the list"?I think you might be able to do it with about a dozen. Maybe. Looking at the thread I'm not even that optimistic for a dozen.Donne, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot . . . ?Tennyson? Maybe. He was good but limited. As Auden said, "There was little about melancholy he didn't know; there was little else he DID know."Browning? Maybe. Oscar Wilde had a point: "Meredith was a prose Browning, and so was Browning. Browning used poetry as a medium for writing in prose."What about post-WWII? I would pick Larkin or Hughes over Auden every day of the week but I have to accept that's a minority view.A lot depends how you rate someone who was good but had his own private religion that most of us do not subscribe to (William Blake, Robert Graves).Or someone who OUGHT to have been great (he wore a big swirling cloak) but whose work mostly consists of flashes and fragments and hints of what might have been (Pound).Or someone who was good but uninterested in what is commonly called rational thought (Dylan Thomas).Or someone who was the best at what he tried to do but that was mainly because he was the only person trying to do it (Gerard Manley Hopkins).Or someone who was clearly a superb wordsmith but no-one knows what the hell he's going on about most of the time (Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery).Or someone who was good (for a brief burst) but insane (Sylvia Plath).Or someone who supposedly wrote the best twentieth-century epic but no-one reads it or quotes it or even knows it exists so how great is it really? (David Jones).
>>25308091>>25308241Good and worthy posts.
>>25307440has to be poe, they named poetry after himfifth is lil c/lit/ty (i wouldnt presume)
>>25308104there's a few (penguin classics puts out the best one, iirc) but to keep the rhyme scheme "translators" have to alter some words/phrasing + there's a few middle english words that have no clean modern english equivalents
>>25307440>Wordsworthlol no
>>25307998Homeric Greek is actually much closer to modern Greek than Beowulf is to modern English because Beowulf predates the Borman conquest. Middle English is a nearer comparison which is the one we were talking about, not Old English which is considered a totally different language not just a different dialect
>>25308619Way, way, way, way more people read and learn modern Greek than Homeric Greek
is it true Wordsworth had a ten inch cock?
>>25310411I don't want that alters things to keep the rhyme scheme. I want one that is Chaucer's original poem, but with all the words in modern english spelling, much like how Shakespeare's works are modernized.
it's donne
>>25309875Patently untrue, concession accepted.
>>25307440It has to be Spenser.
>>25308114basado
>>25308305based and hop-pilled
>>25307440
>>25307440W O R D S W O R T H
>>25310955He objecctively is.Once you read something like Dyer's Grognar Hill you realise Wordsworth was not the genius everybody pretends he is
>>25311898Nobody reads Wordsworth and he grants no clout, so no, he's not. An Grognar Hill bears superficial similarities to Wordsworth's work but it lacks the psychological and moral penetration of his poems, the unity and execution of themes, and the sincerity. The former leans on the type of cliches that Wordsworth would never permit to soil his poetry.
>>25310930what you want doesn't exist because it's not possible to make it. the first two lines in middle english are>Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,>The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,soote means "sweet." you can't "modernize" it to read "sweet" without losing the rhyme, that's what I'm saying
>>25311966>Nobody reads Wordsworth and he grants no clout, so no, he's not.I can go to any bookshop in the country and find Wordsworth's Poems. He's included in quite literally every course on Romantic literature in any university. He is a household name.Dyer isn't. Everything you attribute to Wordsworth was done by better poets years before and by better writers years after. His prelude was outdone by Beattie's Minstrel 30 years before and again by Jefferies' Story of my Heart 80 years after. His work is much too stained with his upper class sensibilities that rural swain poets like Beattie or Thomson and writers like Jefferies stayed free of.
>>25311974I just want an edition that says>When that April with his showers sweet,>The drought of March hath pierced to the root,>And bathed every vine with such liquor,>Of which virtue engender'd is the flower;>When Zephyrus eek with his sweetë breath>Inspired hath in every holt and heathI don't care about preserving all the rhymes.
>>25307440On a technical level probably Spenser or Robert Browning. For significance and modern rep I'd say Eliot.
