Numbers 11 to 20 Greatest Poets

NUMBERS 11 TO 20 GREATEST POETS

Earlier, I posted a series of blogs about the ten greatest poets. See:

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2018/06/ten-greatest-poets.html

In putting together the list, I settled on three evaluative criteria:

1. Influence on world culture
2. Critical legacy

3. Female representation

For so short a list, I observed that these criteria work against minority representation.

To address the lack of minority representation, I prepared another list, Numbers 11 to 20 Greatest Poets, for which minority representation is one of the bases for evaluation.

I came up with the following list:

11. Homer (c. 750 BCE)

12. Vālmīki (c. 400 BCE)

13. Virgil (70 BCE-19 BCE)

14. Tu Fu (712-770)

15. Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591)

16. Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837)

17. Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962)

18. Langston Hughes (1926–1964)

19. Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

20. Wole Soyinka (born 1934)

This second list of ten greatest poets has one woman and three members of minority groups (non-hegemonic groups, from the standpoint of the world literature canon). One member of a minority group is a lesbian, another is an African.

Still, the list leans towards the Anglo-American heritage. Four are poets in English. Only two writers, one Indian and one Chinese, belong to literary threads entirely separate from the Western tradition.

The next ten blogs takes them up one by one.

Negros scops owl