Who is the Most Famous Poet Ever?

[busker]

Influence.  The Shakespearean tree of influence is so vast and profound as to be incalculable.  No matter where you look in the literary and dramatic arts you find Shakespeare.  He's almost omnipresent.  Titanic.  Romeo and Juliet on a sinking ship.  You can almost directly trace the modern TV sitcom back to Shakespeare in plays like As You Like It.  He was the literary and dramatic cartographer of the modern mind and sensibility.  Freud long before Freud.  A secular god in this way.  Shakespeare is smarter and more talented than us all.  The man and artist came as close to artistically subsuming and representing the vast dimensions of the human soul than anyone who came before or after him.  As one Shakespearean scholar once remarked, Shakespeare is everyone and no one. 

This is before you even get into the mind-boggling extravagance of his sheer literary talent.  The guy turned phrases of glittering gold seemingly as easy as putting one foot in front of the other.

I once thought to myself has there ever been anyone in any discipline who has achieved more and been more influential than Shakespeare?  There's only a small handful that come to mind, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Aristotle...it's a short list when you really think about it.

That South Park episode comes to mind when thinking about Shakespeare, that episode where Butters' sidekick exclaims over and over to him "the Simpson's did it" when Butters keeps trying to come up with some new plot that their characters can employ in their quest for some kind of devious originality.  You can almost fill in the phrase "Shakespeare did it" in its place.

Anyway...

Obviously, the founders of a culture influence everything that come after them and Shakespeare plays that role in the English speaking world. Homer has a similar influence - actually, greater, since his straddles all of Europe, not just its English speaking end Virgil less than Homer but more than Shakespeare since Virgil strongly influenced Inferno (not just by being there as Dante’s guide, but in such details as the description of the underworld and the passage of souls across Acheron), and Dante influenced all of Italian literature including Petrarch and Petrarch was the father of the sonnet, ad infinitum. If you think that Shakespeare and Aristotle, or Newton, had the same impact on the world, then you need to get out of your English speaking bubble