The Greatest English Poets of All-Time Period

Well, duh.

Only Shakespeare created more human characters.

His unsurpassed august majesty and reserved stateliness has, thankfully, proved tremendously influential. Whether through his inversions (impious War in Heav'n and Battel proud / With vain attempt), his homeric epithets ("arch-chemic sun"), or his ability to use any one part of speech as another ("without disturb they took alarm"), his orotund voice has resounded in the several of all of his predecessors, from Blake to Beckett, from Melville to Joyce. Reading "Paradise Lost" makes me feel like I'm in the middle of a battle scene from Lord of the Rings or 300.

Self-educated by reading Milton and the more violent books of the Bible (Isaiah, Ezekiel, Revelation), his imagination is unrivaled. "I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans," Los says in one his prophetic books. I cannot think of any system more vivid than Blake's.

Underrated. The Faerie Queene gets a bad rap for being difficult and boring and preachy (even Milton called its author "sage and serious Spenser"), but I can't think of a more colorful and downright ridiculous poem. READ IT.

Witty, pious, sexy. He wrote Holy Sonnets. HOLY! Think about all the sonnets written before him (Shakespeare, Amoretti, Astrophel and Stella, Il Canzionere).

The most influential of the Romantics, because, unlike Blake, people actually bought his books.

In "The Poet" Emerson called out for an American epic. Less than then years later the first edition of "Leaves of Grass" took the world by storm, defining democracy, freedom, creativity, America, and the soul itself in form-shattering verse.

The greatest poet of the twentieth-century. I cannot imagine more direct heir of Blake.

As far as I'm concerned, the period between Milton and the Romantics is one ig dry spell. Pope is the exception.