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

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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?