Shakespeare, Homer or Dante, who is actually the greatest poet in history?

[MurkyInlet]

Ask a room full of poetry lovers to name the single greatest poet who ever lived and you will almost certainly end up with three names dominating the conversation. William Shakespeare left behind 154 sonnets alongside plays written substantially in verse, a body of work that shaped the English language itself so thoroughly that countless everyday phrases people use without thinking originated directly from his pen, giving him a claim to influence that goes well beyond poetry as a standalone art form.

Homer, whether or not the name actually refers to a single historical author, gave Western literature its foundational epic poems in the Iliad and the Odyssey, works composed and transmitted orally centuries before they were ever written down, and poems that essentially invented the entire template for narrative poetry that writers have been building on for roughly three thousand years since.

Dante Alighieri, meanwhile, produced the Divine Comedy, a work so structurally ambitious and theologically rich that it single handedly helped establish Italian as a serious literary language in its own right, while also creating one of the most vivid and enduring depictions of the afterlife ever committed to verse.

Three completely different kinds of poetic genius, spanning close to three millennia between them. Which one actually deserves the title of the greatest poet who ever lived?

[RealChristopher10]

Homer has to be first for me purely on the sheer scale of influence. Every single epic that came after him, in every language, owes something to the template the Iliad and the Odyssey established before writing itself was even reliably in use for that purpose.

[Lampard80]

Dante gets underrated in these conversations outside of dedicated literature circles, but the sheer structural ambition of the Divine Comedy, mapping out an entire cosmology in verse, is honestly more architecturally impressive than anything either Homer or Shakespeare attempted.

[Kieron93]

The fact we cannot even confirm Homer was a single person makes this a slightly unfair comparison. If those poems are actually the product of an oral tradition built by many contributors over generations, that changes the nature of the achievement entirely.

[FairDos72]

I think this question is basically unanswerable honestly, comparing an oral epic tradition, an Elizabethan playwright's sonnets and a medieval Italian cosmological journey feels like measuring three completely different achievements against a single yardstick that does not really fit any of them.

[Northern Squid]

Dante writing in the vernacular Italian of his own time rather than the more prestigious Latin that scholars expected was a genuinely radical choice, and it is easy to forget just how much of a risk that decision actually was for his own reputation at the time.

[Sentinel38]

Shakespeare's sonnets alone would earn him a place in this conversation even without the plays. The sheer emotional range across those 154 poems, from obsessive devotion to bitter jealousy, still reads as startlingly modern centuries later.

[Brad92]

Shakespeare wins this for me because his influence goes so far beyond poetry itself. Reshaping the entire English language while also writing at that level of poetic craft is a combination none of the other two can really claim in quite the same way