Thanks for your scholarly introduction, Shaun.
For myself, I confess that I do not find the category “greatness” very useful in my experience of poetry – or of the arts more generally. It is just too diffuse. Without some agreed criteria among the disputants, I find the resulting discussion largely unenlightening. But settling the question of criteria, which seems a prerequisite to any discussion, would be a mighty undertaking indeed.
One aspect of the matter would surely involve exploring the evolution of aesthetic taste in its wider social and economic contexts. In the case of Shakespeare, for example, and just for the UK, this might take in the history of theatre, access to education, the nature of the education available over time to different sections of the population, authority-structures, the rise and fall in the popularity of the different plays in relation to changing historical conditions, and the uses to which Shakespeare has been put, not just by directors but by politicians and others. I merely sketch a few possibilities; there are others. It would also involve a diachronic view of the various genres of composition. Perhaps this way of thinking challenges what seems implicit in some remarks above that “greatness” is an absolute, somehow above time and the contingencies of experience. This is of course a view articulated very early by Ben Jonson in his dedicatory poem in the First Folio of 1623, when he declared his friend was “not of an age but for all time!” It’s a glorious compliment, but, rationally, hard to justify, perhaps.
So, to my mind, it’s a bit too easy to throw out impressionistic claims for the “greatness” of such-and-such a writer, claims which sometimes serve, explicitly or implicitly, as a way of condemning, on equally dubious grounds, those from whom the label is withheld.
Another thing that can be lost sight of when debate becomes especially vaporous is close and attentive consideration of the means particular writers employ and the ends to which they employ them. Given that Eratosphere is, primarily, a board concerned with “workshopping” the poems of its participants, this seems rather a shame.
Clive
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