I think Goethe, Dante, Virgil & Homer are exempt from criticism as foreigners. Who comes up as your top five writers in English?
I think it’s culturally acceptable to argue that Picasso was better than Michaelangelo (or to prefer Leonardo or even Rembrandt), that Bach was better than Mozart (or even that Tchaikovsky was better than both), that Plato was more important than Aristotle, that Einstein or even Darwin mattered more than Newton. In a way that you simply can’t suggest another english-speaking writer was better than Shakespeare in polite company. (Heck, I’ll bite your bullet; I don’t think one could openly suggest Goethe was better than Shakespeare, and you’d only get away with Virgil or Homer because people haven’t read them and so couldn’t argue).
I’ve never read any of your four (except insofar as Goethe is responsible for Marlowe, or SHAFT); I can think of two friends who’ve read Dante, and one insufferably pretentious acquaintance who read Homer. But every schoolchild studies at least two Shakespeare plays. I think the gap really is much wider than in other fields of endeavour.
I think Goethe, Dante, Virgil & Homer are exempt from criticism as foreigners. Who comes up as your top five writers in English?
Besides Shakespeare, the top list includes Byron & Scott. Judging from later discussions, I think a longer list would have included Poe, Whitman, Shelley, Keats, & Wordsworth, but Murray doesn’t include a fuller sorted listed. (He gives all the rankings for figures in Western Literature in pg562 which you could extract the full English literature ranking from if you really wanted to, but I didn’t.)
Heck, I’ll bite your bullet; I don’t think one could openly suggest Goethe was better than Shakespeare
It would be difficult to make that suggestion, yes, in part because Goethe himself so praised Shakespeare, and it would be a temerarious person indeed who dared disagree with the writer he was trying to claim as being better.
(That page, incidentally, is interesting reading who anyone who thinks that Bardolatry is unfounded and unrelated to his merits. Why would Milton, that most independent-minded man, praise Shakespeare so, anonymously, just 16 years after his death? What literary conspiracy could have been formed by that point?)
you simply can’t suggest another english-speaking writer was better than Shakespeare in polite company.
I think we must move in different circles. I don’t think anyone I know would be particularly offended if I claimed to prefer, say, Milton to Shakespeare or to think M. objectively better than S.
I think Goethe, Dante, Virgil & Homer are exempt from criticism as foreigners. Who comes up as your top five writers in English?
I think it’s culturally acceptable to argue that Picasso was better than Michaelangelo (or to prefer Leonardo or even Rembrandt), that Bach was better than Mozart (or even that Tchaikovsky was better than both), that Plato was more important than Aristotle, that Einstein or even Darwin mattered more than Newton. In a way that you simply can’t suggest another english-speaking writer was better than Shakespeare in polite company. (Heck, I’ll bite your bullet; I don’t think one could openly suggest Goethe was better than Shakespeare, and you’d only get away with Virgil or Homer because people haven’t read them and so couldn’t argue).
I’ve never read any of your four (except insofar as Goethe is responsible for Marlowe, or SHAFT); I can think of two friends who’ve read Dante, and one insufferably pretentious acquaintance who read Homer. But every schoolchild studies at least two Shakespeare plays. I think the gap really is much wider than in other fields of endeavour.
Besides Shakespeare, the top list includes Byron & Scott. Judging from later discussions, I think a longer list would have included Poe, Whitman, Shelley, Keats, & Wordsworth, but Murray doesn’t include a fuller sorted listed. (He gives all the rankings for figures in Western Literature in pg562 which you could extract the full English literature ranking from if you really wanted to, but I didn’t.)
It would be difficult to make that suggestion, yes, in part because Goethe himself so praised Shakespeare, and it would be a temerarious person indeed who dared disagree with the writer he was trying to claim as being better.
(That page, incidentally, is interesting reading who anyone who thinks that Bardolatry is unfounded and unrelated to his merits. Why would Milton, that most independent-minded man, praise Shakespeare so, anonymously, just 16 years after his death? What literary conspiracy could have been formed by that point?)
I think we must move in different circles. I don’t think anyone I know would be particularly offended if I claimed to prefer, say, Milton to Shakespeare or to think M. objectively better than S.