Quote:
Originally Posted by Trollheart
It's a sad but somewhat funny fact that were you to ask a hundred random people what the name Homer meant to them, at least ninety of them would say Homer Simpson...
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Ah, but that's a very different question loaded with different assumptions. A question about Homer on GoodReads.com would hardly yield that dismal identification percentage rate.
Lisnaholic made a good point about the role of poetry when evaluating the influence of a writer (though I can't concur about the broader influence of Dylan Thomas). Shakespeare was certainly a poet, and in fact, if people were to pick up any of his works on the fly today, it would more than likely be his collection of sonnets. Many of the writers in the poll list have admitted to being initiated into the world of writing with hearing poetry at a young age. Baldwin, who I was watching last night on a YouTube clip, admitted to being in the profession of "poets". That's, of course, the larger/historical sense of the word. But poetry's chief delights are aural, not written, which is why the best Shakespeare experience, for example, is in watching/listening to him. Can't say that about Henry James (one of my favorites) unless you've got an especially talented reciter delivering his lines which, in any case, are from a novel, which has different objectives than the poem in terms of reception.