Who is the Most Famous Poet Ever?

[busker]

you stated he could not form a full opinion on their literary merit and now you say drama can be translated? what is it, can it be  or can it not be.

and no i've viced my opinion that tolstoy is a hack and shakespeare is much more famous. this is my opinion. itried to change the subject once and get back to the thread but you're staling me

The literary merit of Shakespeare is entirely in his situational poetry.
His drama is in blank verse, unlike modern drama
Tolstoy could not have been in a position to form a full opinion of Shakespere’s merit because he could not have read his poetry in the original. He was, however, capable of forming an opinion on Shakespeare’s worth as a dramatist. The arguments he propounded were rational, and he did not resort to arbitrary name calling!
Your view that Shakespeare is more famous is a biased, English language centric point of view. Pushkin is the most famous poet in Russia, and Goethe in Germany. Dante is more famous than Shakespeare in Italy, Iqbal and Ghalib more famous in Pakistan. Shakespeare is one of the big names in world literature, and not the pre eminence that English speakers think he is.

At any rate, my original contention was that Shakespeare was a great poet and a great writer of comedies. That’s because his genius lay in the use of imagistic language, not in realistic story telling. The ending of Hamlet, the ending of Romeo and Juliet, the beginning of Lear, and the second half of Measure for Measure are hopelessly unrealistic or anticlimactic. These make the willing suspension of disbelief difficult.
Othello was a tight knit well paced play and so was Macbeth, the latter because it was based on Holinshed’s history and the plot was supplied readily.
When Shakespeare had to improvise on a story the end result was disappointing. His Roman tragedies worked because the story couldn’t be changed. The comedies worked because realism was irrelevant.