Dante, the one-hit wonder

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:38 AM -0500 3/7/11, George Thompson wrote:
>  >From today's NYTimes:
>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).

And did so less ninnily, I'd argue.  Of course I'm probably
influenced by the fact that the constituency and order of Tommasini's
Top 4 (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert) matched exactly the
constituency and almost (modulo the Beethoven/Mozart ranking) exactly
the order of the megabytes devoted to composers in my iTunes.  I
wouldn't begin to assess Rader's nadirs.  (Tommasini did make it
easier for himself by placing strict cultural--European--parameters
on his search.)

LH

>  [his top poet i Pablo Neruda]  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."
>
>So 6 of the top 10 write in English, and the list is rounded out by
>a Spanish, an Italian, a Persian and a Chinese poet; no poet who
>wrote in Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, German . . . . . measured
>up.
>
>Did I mention that no Greek or Latin poet could make the cut?
>
>I post this just to show you folks that Linguistics isn;t the only
>field of study beset by ninnies.
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/books/07arts-THE10BESTPOE_BRF.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=dante&st=cse
>
>GAT
>
>George A. Thompson
>Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre",
>Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.  Working on a
>new edition, though.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org