In February Dean Rader, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, set out to discover history’s 10 best poets (much like Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times recently did for composers). After spending two weeks compiling a list of nominees and fielding readers’ comments about them on the Web site of The San Francisco Chronicle, Mr. Rader has released his final list, with the Latin American poet Pablo Neruda at No. 1. “No poet has more passionately and thoroughly spoken for his people than Neruda,” Mr. Rader wrote, citing “Canto General,” a 15-part book comprising over 200 poems and 15,000 lines tracing the history of Latin America. “It is an insanely ambitious project that seemed to unify a country.” In second place was Shakespeare, whose name, according to Mr. Rader’s “shockingly unscientific measurements,” appeared most frequently in reader e-mails, followed by Dante, who Mr. Rader said was the most controversial pick, because “he’s only well known for one poem (‘The Divine Comedy’).” Western literary greats like Walt Whitman, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens also appear on the list with the Eastern favorites Rumi and Li Po, whom Mr. Rader called “the great poet of drunkenness.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/books/07arts-THE10BESTPOE_BRF.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/books/07arts-THE10BESTPOE_BRF.html?_r=0