First the... best?

[Clopin]

So is it just Harold Blooms influence or is everyone really unanimously of the opinion that Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Homer, Milton, Chaucer and whoever wrote the Eddas are the best literary talents of all time? So Dante is the first to write a big deal work in modern Italian and since the year 1310 nobody has innovated or displayed a writing talent to be his equal? Chaucer around the same time pens his Canterbury tales and now, 600+ years later, the work is still unequalled? Now I've read The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Poetic Edda, The Prose Edda, The Metamorphoses... etc and I enjoyed them all but are they really the best? The overwhelmingly safe consensus I see from pretty much everyone is...

"Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer are undoubtedly the best English language writers, then Blake Joyce, T.S Eliot, Yeats, Whitman, Dickinson and Austen..."

It seems to be just taken for granted by everyone that anybody writing after the 1700's is going to necessarily be 'lesser' than the Greeks and Roman classicists and certainly lesser than the holy English trinity of Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer.

Now I'm not going to even pretend to have had anywhere near the breadth of reading that would be required for a serious analysis and weighing of the authors I've mentioned so I want to ask two questions.

1. Are authors such as Homer and Shakespeare the absolute best writers?
2. If we take it that the answer to 1 is yes than why is it that Dante has never been equalled in Italian, Homer in Greek or Chaucer in English?

I also think there's a sort of disparity in how critics view works from different eras. I like Le Morte D'Arthur, I like it a lot; reading it is like reading a singsong book of magic and wonder and I appreciate how amazing it is to read a piece of history like his compilation of the grail legends. But lets be real, he mentions that so and so is a "passing good knight" twice a paragraph, his endless descriptions of tournaments and placings are tedious and cumbersome and the dialogue and character motivations are flat and bizarre to the modern reader. Considering this modern reader it is my opinion that the retelling of Malory's material by T.H White is the better novel - the characters especially being much more three dimensional and fleshed out - and yet I feel the Malory version and the writing therein is venerated much more highly.

As important as the Elder Edda undoubtedly is I personally find more to recommend in the writing of The Waste Land.

Anyway any thoughts?

[mal4mac]

So is it just Harold Blooms influence or is everyone really unanimously of the opinion that Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Homer, Milton, Chaucer and whoever wrote the Eddas are the best literary talents of all time?

Is that even Harold Bloom's opinion? In "The Western canon" Bloom places Shakespeare above all others, with only Dante, Milton, and Chaucer appearing amongst the 26 great writers he considers at length. He doesn't consider classical writers at length, but (reading between the lines) I think only Homer would be competing with Dante for second place. I think most critics would, like Bloom, have Virgil, T.S. Eliot, and the Eddas struggling to make the top fifty.

I think "most critics" have Tolstoy competing with Dante and Homer for that silver medal, with Montaigne, Goethe, Dickens, Nietzsche and Cervantes going for the bronze, ahead of the other guys you mention. But I guess it depends on which critics you are reading...

[Clopin]

Is that even Harold Bloom's opinion? In "The Western canon" Bloom places Shakespeare above all others, with only Dante, Milton, and Chaucer appearing amongst the 26 great writers he considers at length. He doesn't consider classical writers at length, but (reading between the lines) I think only Homer would be competing with Dante for second place. I think most critics would, like Bloom, have Virgil, T.S. Eliot, and the Eddas struggling to make the top fifty.

I think "most critics" have Tolstoy competing with Dante and Homer for that silver medal, with Montaigne, Goethe, Dickens, Nietzsche and Cervantes going for the bronze, ahead of the other guys you mention. But I guess it depends on which critics you are reading...


I don't read much criticism (do critics even routinely 'rank' authors?), I'm mainly going by what I've seen on here but is Nietzsche really considered a top tier writer? I mean as opposed to philosopher. Cervantes obviously fits into my question, is he the best? If so why? Any ideas why nobody has surpassed him?

Take something like Chess for instance, the game is always evolving and players are forced to keep up. The current world champion Magnus Carlsen would absolutely demolish historical greats like Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca (yes he would, sorry to any Capa fans), Alekhine, Morphy, Staunton, and Tarrasch; this is because Carlsen has built on the established base of his great predecessors. This is true of virtually any objective discipline. The Montreal Canadiens hockey team as it exists today would obliterate the Montreal Canadienes of Maurice Richard, send the best wrestler alive today back to ancient Greece and there would be no contest. Are we really supposed to accept that in literature or other subjective fields of art there is no progression for hundreds and hundreds of years? If not millenia?

[Clopin]

And before someone throws a fit I mean progression as in Shakespeare progresses to the next best English poet who is even better than Shakespeare and not progress of literary forms or styles which we can all observe... they just aren't as good as Chaucer was yet...

[Clopin]

Actually fashion is an obvious example of a subjective art form which follows pretty much the opposite trend. I'm not exactly an expert but it seems like current designers are not exactly taking their cues from what was the height of fashion in ancient greece or Victorian England and the aesthetic that permeates most current collections by more artsy designers leans heavily toward avant garde taking more influence from say... crust punk or industrial music than beethoven. In discussioni don't see designers from over a hundred years ago and the current iconic fathers of design like Yohji Yamamato are still alive.

[mal4mac]

I don't read much criticism (do critics even routinely 'rank' authors?), I'm mainly going by what I've seen on here but is Nietzsche really considered a top tier writer? I mean as opposed to philosopher. Cervantes obviously fits into my question, is he the best? If so why? Any ideas why nobody has surpassed him?

I think they do rank them, if mostly somewhat vaguely. Bloom, and others, certainly rank Shakespeare highest.

Chess is a very limited game, with 32 characters who never change (!) So it's straightfoward to build up a database of "best openings" and other strategies. This is shown by the fact that the latest chess computers would demolish Magnus Carlsen. Literature deals with the human situation, which comes in a multitude of different forms, making it impossible to delineate "best openings". Bloom suggests reading nothing but Shakespeare for several days and then reading A.N. Other for a few days. He reckons you should just "see" that Shakespeare is better, whoever A.N. Other is (even if he is Tolstoy or Homer...), because of displaying greater "cognitive strength", "superior mimesis", or greater-anything-else in all the most important aesthetic dimensions.

[hypatia_]

A lot of it has to do with what they've contributed to literature as we know it. They built a foundation that all great writers emulate.

[JHG]

I struggle to cast a definite opinion of whether Bloom is correct or not. His opinion is certainly justifiable and in line with great literary minds before and after him.

Having delved into serious criticism over the past several months (though not yet Bloom), I can safely say that a theme prevails over much of 18th and 19th century English criticism in regards to what is "best." So, it wasn't just Bloom who emerged with these ideas. To greatly simplify: Each sphere or epoch of admiration is a time of great innovation and of great culture. Most famous among these are Pericles' Athens, Renaissance Italy, and Elizabethan England.

Homer represents the best of the Greek world, and the Athenian Greek world is what Arnold calls (summarizing) a perfect culmination of culture and religion. See: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writings/1.html. Dante could be said to fulfill the same role for Renaissance Italy. Shakespeare may not have so much religious influence, but one could say that his idolation of historical figures at least helps in that regard. In any case, by breadth of influence does Shakespeare fit the bill, and as the only among the three who wrote native English, it's little surprize that he is often considered the "best" by English-speaking critics. Though some, notably Thomas Love Peacock, have asserted that Milton is the superior. Certainly Milton better culminates the prevailing Religious influence. see: http://www.thomaslovepeacock.net/FourAges.html

Having summarized this in relation exclusively to the narrow path above mentioned, let me attempt to answer the questions just as narrowly:

1. Homer, yes. Shakespeare, debatable. (I personally put Milton in the lead)
2. Homer has no equal in Greek and perhaps any language - see above. Dante has no equal in Italian as his work represents the literary culmination of a great epoch in human history. Chaucer well represents his age but does not repesent the best of English literature.

[PeterL]

Bloom may have been trying to make a joke.

That's the sort of assertion that can only lead to disagreement.

[Vota]

Homer is the greatest for me, ATM. I have only been seriously reading classic literature for a little over a year, so that could easily change at any time, but The Iliad and The Odyssey were both powerful, moving, and beautiful to me. For me, a work has to hit all my aesthetic high points for me to truly hold it in the highest esteem, and those two books do it for me.

I enjoyed Milton's Paradise Lost, and in hindsight thought it was pretty fantastic. I actually thought it was a significantly easier read to get absorbed into than a book I recently read, Moby Dick. You would think Paradise Lost would be harder to read, but Melville's syntax is just bizarre. I got used to it after 20-30 pages, and because I took my time, reading only 20-30 pages a night, came to rather savor my readings, and while the allegorical elements and philosophical elements of the book were excellent, and the cetological details fascinating, the book never completely grabbed me. Paradise Lost grabbed me, and The Iliad and The Odyssey took me for a ride.

[Clopin]

Also in film this is especially the case, though the time spans are necessarily much shorter. Asking most critics who the best directors are, their choices and general consensus would place Hitchcock, and Welles at the top. I've also heard it asserted by people like Roger Ebert that Charlie Chaplin remains the funniest comedy in film... total bunk in my opinion. I've read dissertions on the masterful portrayel of Stanley by Marlon Brando in A Streetcar named Desire and to me the performance is crap and does not hold up today. Modern actors give better performances.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=61QgUx45Q3s

Film is also a medium where a few decades have brought enormous technical leaps forward when it comes to capturing an image and more sophisticated, more readily available film cameras and equipment mean that independent film making is becoming easier and easier, yet despite all of thesee massive improvements in technology, despite all the directors and film makers who learned from people like Hitchcock and decades of new and innovative film the BEST movies are still Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai and Vertigo? So how come nobody has managed to upstage them. Again I can draw a comparison with the previous example of Charlie Chaplin as I feel comedy is a teensy bit more of an objective discipline than just filmmaking. People either laugh or they do not. I suspect that very few people honestly find the films of Chaplin more hilarious than say... Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle or the comedies Woody Allen made which means that for nearly everyone the assertion that Charlie Chaplin remains the funniest can pretty much be demonstrated as being untrue so you're left with a situation where a very small number of people, who happen to be film critics are proclaiming Chaplin to be the best out of what seems to me like nothing but sheer veneration. Is this also the case with Hitchcock or other directors where a critic can write pages and pages on the masterful portrayel of this and that or how such and such scene brilliantly evokes x emotion with no objective laugh track to either confirm or contradict these widely repeated sentiments.


I was reading Eberts review of Herzogs remake of Nosferatu; in the review Ebert asserts that Herzog 'as nearly as possible' manages to capture the eerie atmosphere and suspense of the original. What hogwash, the original is only a good film to a modern audience in that it is a recognized classic... Herzogs version is much the better film, but of course suggesting that amounts to some sort of sacrilige.

I'll put Herzogs filmography up against Hitchcocks anyday.

[stlukesguild]

Age has something to do with how important artists are seen in the sense that a older artist has the advantage of generations of subsequent artists building upon his or her foundation. On the other hand, more recent artists may be seen by certain members of the audience as more "relevant". I question just how important Huxley, Orwell... and even Dostoevsky might appear after another couple hundred years.

Now I've read The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Poetic Edda, The Prose Edda, The Metamorphoses... etc and I enjoyed them all but are they really the best?

I have read little that equals Shakespeare, Dante's Comedia, Homer, and Paradise Lost... and can think of nothing that surpasses them at their finest. Still there are works of the greatest achievement among the more recent writers. I would include Tolstoy, Proust, T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, J.L. Borges, etc...

Seriously, how important is this obsession with ranking? Challenging traditional opinions of the relative merits of a given writer seems to be a game for would be iconoclasts who usually have little to go on... or simply the result of thinking that one's personal "likes" or "dislikes" are akin to some objective judgement as to what is "good" or "bad": "I didn't like Moby Dick, thus Melville's novel must be overrated and really not all that."

Even if it were possible to assign an objective ranking... (Shakespeare at no. 1, Dante at no. 2, Stephanie Meyer at no. 3 :eek2:, etc...) how does this impact our reading. Am I to take less pleasure and feel cheated by "wasting" time reading Theophile Gautier, Walter Pater, and Kafka when I could have been reading Dante and Shakespeare... again?

It seems to be just taken for granted by everyone that anybody writing after the 1700's is going to necessarily be 'lesser' than the Greeks and Roman classicists and certainly lesser than the holy English trinity of Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer.

According to whom? From my experience Tolstoy, James Joyce, Proust, Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, Kafka, J.L. Borges, Italo Calvino, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Victor Hugo, Rimbaud, Fernando Pessoa, Rilke, Neruda, and many more are consistently recognized as some of the finest writers of any era.

...why is it that Dante has never been equalled in Italian, Homer in Greek...

You tell me. Why has no Italian artist surpassed Michelangelo and no Dutch painter surpassed Rembrandt? Artistic ability and achievement are not egalitarian... spread equally across all times and cultures. There is a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time. Would Michelangelo's genius have been as immediately recognized and as influential as it was had he been born and raised in Norway or Russia? He wouldn't have had access to the same level of education, the access to the same quality of examples of work by his artistic predecessors (Greek and Roman antiquities, Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello), the financial support of such powerful patrons as the Medici and the Popes... nor the subsequent promotion of his art to other artists and connoisseurs as a result of where his art was placed. What is the likelihood that Mozart would have had the education and support... as well as the subsequent recognition... had he lived in Spain or Ireland? His great peer, Haydn, failed to ever achieve anything in the realm of opera near to the works of Mozart... for the simple reason that his patrons in Austro-Hungary didn't support his endeavors in this direction.

There are any number of brilliant writers in Italian subsequent to Dante: Boccaccio, Petrarch, Goldoni, Tasso, Foscolo, Leopardi, Verga, Montale, Saba, Calvino, etc... How many had the luck to have born at a time at which they could literally become one of the first to "invent" the Italian language as a literary force? How many lived at a time in which Italy was virtually the center of culture in Europe? How many had the grandeur of vision... and the genius of Dante?

I also think there's a sort of disparity in how critics view works from different eras. I like Le Morte D'Arthur, I like it a lot; reading it is like reading a singsong book of magic and wonder and I appreciate how amazing it is to read a piece of history like his compilation of the grail legends. But lets be real, he mentions that so and so is a "passing good knight" twice a paragraph, his endless descriptions of tournaments and placings are tedious and cumbersome and the dialogue and character motivations are flat and bizarre to the modern reader.

Quite honestly, I've rarely heard of Le Morte D'Arthur spoken of as one of the towering works of literature.

As important as the Elder Edda undoubtedly is I personally find more to recommend in the writing of The Waste Land.

We have a medievalist member who will likely disagree. Personally, I too find Eliot more interesting. But there are others like Shakespeare, Blake, Milton, Keats... who I find greater than Eliot.

Take something like Chess for instance, the game is always evolving and players are forced to keep up. The current world champion Magnus Carlsen would absolutely demolish historical greats like Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca (yes he would, sorry to any Capa fans), Alekhine, Morphy, Staunton, and Tarrasch; this is because Carlsen has built on the established base of his great predecessors. This is true of virtually any objective discipline. The Montreal Canadiens hockey team as it exists today would obliterate the Montreal Canadienes of Maurice Richard, send the best wrestler alive today back to ancient Greece and there would be no contest. Are we really supposed to accept that in literature or other subjective fields of art there is no progression for hundreds and hundreds of years? If not millenia?

Art is not an area in which there is necessarily improvement. Yes, there is progression. Art changes as the world changes and thus the artist's responses to the world changes. But this is not inherently "improvement". The art critic, Robert Hughes pointed out that an average second year med student at an average medical school today knows more of anatomy, physiology, illness and the immune system than the greatest physician in the greatest physicians of Renaissance Paris and Padua. On the other hand, there are now artists living today that are clearly better than Michelangelo or Rembrandt. Art builds upon the past... but it is not simply a field of accumulative knowledge. The goals of art continue to change with each subsequent artist and era. If our artistic goals remained stagnant, like that of Egypt over many millennium, then yes, subsequent generations would likely grow increasingly sophisticated... but our art continually evolves.

Actually fashion is an obvious example of a subjective art form which follows pretty much the opposite trend. I'm not exactly an expert but it seems like current designers are not exactly taking their cues from what was the height of fashion in ancient greece or Victorian England and the aesthetic that permeates most current collections by more artsy designers leans heavily toward avant garde taking more influence from say... crust punk or industrial music than beethoven.

The French during the reign of Napoleon embraced fashion rooted in ancient Greece and Rome...

http://i1245.photobucket.com/albums/gg581/StlukesguildOhio/th_07e92a66a477943746bc4faec32f8599_zpsc3d10124.jp g (http://s1245.photobucket.com/user/StlukesguildOhio/media/07e92a66a477943746bc4faec32f8599_zpsc3d10124.jpg.h tml)

Such a return to and variation on ancient Greece showed up in the 1950s...

http://i1245.photobucket.com/albums/gg581/StlukesguildOhio/th_50bf05a61fda11b0a054ffab8b4a6440_zps5f51a737.jp g (http://s1245.photobucket.com/user/StlukesguildOhio/media/50bf05a61fda11b0a054ffab8b4a6440_zps5f51a737.jpg.h tml)

... and again recently...

http://i1245.photobucket.com/albums/gg581/StlukesguildOhio/th_af120fdd8d4d671bd29acdaf84755b8a_zps3e77415b.jp g (http://s1245.photobucket.com/user/StlukesguildOhio/media/af120fdd8d4d671bd29acdaf84755b8a_zps3e77415b.jpg.h tml)

Coppola's Dracula inspired a trend in Neo-Romantic/Victorian dress:

http://royalblack.at/tl_files/royalblack/Gallery%20Images/Draculas%20Bride/dracula01.jpg

These sunglasses and top-hats became trendy for a while...

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yykBBVNNDxQ/TpSjygUfs9I/AAAAAAAAC7U/1YR4JF3yj4k/s400/images.jpg

Dolce & Gabbana had a recent show of dresses inspired by the Byzantine...

http://img.buzznet.com/assets/imgx/2/1/1/7/1/8/9/4/orig-21171894.jpg

Art continues to build upon the ancient past, the near past, and the present.

[JCamilo]

One thing in my opinion that older artists have as advantage to youger is: they lasted enough to be forgotten and remembered. Homer is not just a writer, he is part of the memory of humankind. The more an artist resemble a memory and the less a textbook, the more it cannot be challenged.

[Clopin]

I think you have me wrong Stluke, I'm not interested in ranking anything I just wonder how in such a subjective field the verdict on a concrete top ten can be so unanimous among critics. I also question critics who do rank things as having way too much respect for being the "first" to do something and I have to question how nearly everyone comes to the same conclusion. Lets suppose we exist in a world where nobody has access to the opinions of others, say everyone lives in a small room with every work currently considered seminal in the western canon and as many years or lifetimes as needed to finish them all. They enter the room with their current memories of experiences, upbringing etc, minus anything they have ever read and minus what they know about Western literature. After concluding their lifes work how many of them would come out and say "well my absolute favourites were William Shakespeare, Dante, John Milton, Homer and Chaucer? I suspect very very few and that the actual results would be exceedingly sporadic, with authors many of us won't have read or heard of appearing everywhere in peoples top 100 or what have you.

Now I know it's often a partly historical context which places these particular writers at the top of the heap, and that's fair, but it's definitely true that certain crtics like Bloom will state that Chaucer's writing specif8cally, as distinct from his influence, is second only to Shakespeare's and that Miltons writing is third, etc.

I've read Chaucer and I don't pretend to be an expert but that just seems untrue to me and I question how many people (in universities especially) are expert enough to actually make a critical judgement on Chaucer's writing - especially given that it's middle english. But you'll get Bloom going on about the strength of the writing and evocativeness and all that and it just feels like wind to me, in the same way a critic can blather on for half a page about the magnificent use of suspense in Psycho. Are you familiar with the website pitchfork music? The reviewers there are experts in saying a lot about a record in ecstatic vagueries and I feel like most criticism is just that.

[JCamilo]

Man, Homer was not read for centuries, then people wihtout knowing him started to read and were amazed. Shakespeare wasn't read since ever by continental europe (wasn't that much read outside some english circles) until XVII century and when they started to read him? They were amazed. Dante was pretty much abandoned by enlightment thinkers due to his medieval catholicism and when they rediscovered him, he was placed in the pedestal. Milton reading is suffering a heavy decline considering his status 2 centuries ago, I am pretty sure at the time they shake the dust, they will find him just as welcome as Chaucer...

They are beyond reading. Erase humanity and all occidental culture and you may have a chance to have those guys somehow, stripped of their importance. (and not because they are the first to anything... Except Homer and maybe Dante, they were not there for being inventors but for doing that idea better. )

[stlukesguild]

I just wonder how in such a subjective field the verdict on a concrete top ten can be so unanimous among critics.

The obvious answer is that Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Tolstoy, Milton, etc... simply are just that good.

I have to question how nearly everyone comes to the same conclusion.

Is it really that difficult to fathom that Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, etc... Or in music: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven... Or in the Visual arts: Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens, etc... are acknowledged as among the greatest within their respective fields by such a number of individuals because they are? Your struggle seems to be: "Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, etc... don't seem to me to be the greatest authors I have read... and since it cannot be possible that what I like and what is "great" are no one and the same... everyone else must be wrong... or must be blinded by the opinions of others."

Lets suppose we exist in a world where nobody has access to the opinions of others, say everyone lives in a small room with every work currently considered seminal in the western canon and as many years or lifetimes as needed to finish them all. They enter the room with their current memories of experiences, upbringing etc, minus anything they have ever read and minus what they know about Western literature. After concluding their lifes work how many of them would come out and say "well my absolute favourites were William Shakespeare, Dante, John Milton, Homer and Chaucer? I suspect very very few and that the actual results would be exceedingly sporadic, with authors many of us won't have read or heard of appearing everywhere in peoples top 100 or what have you.

The problem with your scenario is that we don't live in a void. We live in a world in which Shakespeare and Beethoven and Michelangelo are part of our collective cultural memories. We cannot read Milton, Goethe, Proust, Joyce, and many, many others without sensing the impact of Shakespeare. We cannot look at Caravaggio, Rubens, Beckmann... or even Lucian Freud without recognizing elements of Michelangelo. Art involves a dialog with art... as well as with life.

Now I know it's often a partly historical context which places these particular writers at the top of the heap, and that's fair, but it's definitely true that certain crtics like Bloom will state that Chaucer's writing specifcally, as distinct from his influence, is second only to Shakespeare's and that Miltons writing is third, etc. I've read Chaucer and I don't pretend to be an expert but that just seems untrue to me and I question how many people (in universities especially) are expert enough to actually make a critical judgement on Chaucer's writing - especially given that it's middle english. But you'll get Bloom going on about the strength of the writing and evocativeness and all that and it just feels like wind to me...

You admit that you are not an "expert" but then you turn about and question the opinions of those who are "experts" as being nothing but wind. Certainly no one would suggest that critics are always right... and certainly some critics are better than others... but the reality is that the "expert's" opinion is based upon a great deal of experience. What do you find failing in Chaucer? The author brings the concept of a unique voice as mirrored in the language and style of each character. This results in an invention of character that surpasses a great many writers. His language, itself, certainly strikes me as quite evocative and marvelous. Quite honestly, his "Middle English" is not all that difficult to grasp... certainly much less so than Langland's Piers Plowman. But lets be honest here... do you imagine that Faulkner, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Proust, the epic poems of William Blake... or many other works of more recent literature are far easier to grasp?

[mortalterror]

The way I understand the subject is that there is no linear progress in art. It seems to be more cyclical, full of cultural waxing and waning. Personally, we may progress, but that progress is limited by our human capacities. Nobody beats Shakespeare and Dante for the same reason that almost nobody grows to be more than 7 feet tall. Those are just human maximums. In sports you can take drugs to make you faster and stronger, but we don't really have anything to make you smarter and more creative which wasn't available to Dante, Shakespeare, and Homer. Artistic training is largely the same as it ever was: read books, practice writing, observe human nature.

It's wrong to think of Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer as first and best, because they weren't the first. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of great story tellers before Homer. He's just one of the first of his caliber to write things down. What you are seeing when you get a Homer or a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Goethe, or a Tolstoy is basically a once in a century type talent, and there are maybe twenty or thirty at that level over the course of written history. We might start seeing similar figures appearing more frequently as populations, economies, and literacy rates have risen, although then again we might not.

I suppose if hypothetically you wanted to artificially produce a major literary talent, you would have to do it something like the way prospects are nurtured, trained up, scouted, and brought along in sports. You spot a young talented kid, send him to the best writing schools in the country, pamper him with money, culture, and esteem the way the Medici's raised Michelangelo and who knows. You'd probably have to do this with hundreds or thousands of kids every year to produce the Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan of literary all stars, and then there has to be lucrative endorsement deals and fame at the end of the tunnel to spur everyone's enthusiasm, get them reaching for that brass ring. And even if you aren't a major star the financial incentive to enter a career in writing would have to be the same as for a doctor or a lawyer. So basically, do the opposite of what we currently do, where we cut arts programs, warehouse kids in substandard inner city schools full of violent disinterested children and drugs, and then make it impossible for writers to make a living at their trade, paying them peanuts, saddle them with student loans, and leave them to die in the gutter.

Think about it. It can't just be coincidence that Beethoven's father was a music teacher, Mozart's father was a music teacher, and Bach's whole family were famous musicians. They had to be born with natural talent, but they had the rare opportunities from an early age necessary to make the most of their talents. When everyone in the world has those sorts of opportunities you are going to see more Beethovens and Mozarts. The kid in Africa who's town doesn't have a swimming pool is not going to grow up to be the next Michael Phelps.

[MorpheusSandman]

I just wonder how in such a subjective field the verdict on a concrete top ten can be so unanimous among critics. I also question critics who do rank things as having way too much respect for being the "first" to do something and I have to question how nearly everyone comes to the same conclusion.Some thoughts: the total artistic output from any culture from any time is immense. Even in cultures where literacy was not widespread and only a certain group have access to the tools necessary for art, everything that's produced cannot possibly survive. So cultures have to be selective in deciding what to pass on to the next generation. Sometimes, especially when it comes to ancient works, the selection may be somewhat arbitrary (as things like wars can wipe out cultural/artistic productions and what's "passed on" is literally what survives), but each subsequent generation gets to weigh in; and the next generation includes critics, artists, and the public. When it comes to authors like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, et al., they've not only survived this temporal trial, but each generation seems to produce quite a few people that find them to be as great and relevant as every prior generation has. That's how canons get formed.

If you consider the elite of the elite authors, those that have survived for centuries, they constitute probably less than 1% of all authors that have ever written, or maybe even that survives. Given that statistic, of course it's improbable that we will see another such in our time. It's against the odds for each generation to produce a Dante or Shakespeare and not every generation is equally likely to. Dante and Shakespeare, especially, came along when they had a chance to be amongst the first to really innovate and solidify their language through their art. The ground they covered was so immense, that subsequent authors tend to have to stake out smaller and smaller grounds to establish themselves. That combination of breadth and depth is difficult to equal.

As for critics, I don't think all critics come to the same opinions. Not every literary critic is as obsessed with Shakespeare as Bloom. Pretty much every critic has their favorites and those they feel are overrated or those whose influence/importance they can appreciate intellectually, but don't feel them emotionally. I think pretty much everyone on here would say the same thing. I do adore Shakespeare and Milton, but I much prefer Virgil to Homer and I think the quality of writing in Chaucer was really variable (some brilliant, some godawful). Likewise, I'm sure we all authors we feel are grossly underrated, especially when it comes to more recent authors. Everyone around here probably knows my love for James Merrill by now; most don't even know who he is. When it comes to contemporary literature, it's our responsibility to argue for our favorites and against our least favorites to influence what the next generation is exposed to. Of course, with modern technology and the widespread availability of art from everywhere and every time, it's easier for individuals to follow their own tastes and not be so influenced by the canon.


Lets suppose we exist in a world where nobody has access to the opinions of others, say everyone lives in a small room with every work currently considered seminal in the western canon and as many years or lifetimes as needed to finish them all. They enter the room with their current memories of experiences, upbringing etc, minus anything they have ever read and minus what they know about Western literature. After concluding their lifes work how many of them would come out and say "well my absolute favourites were William Shakespeare, Dante, John Milton, Homer and Chaucer? I suspect very very few and that the actual results would be exceedingly sporadic, with authors many of us won't have read or heard of appearing everywhere in peoples top 100 or what have you.As St. Lukes said, this just isn't the world we live in and it's difficult to imagine what it would be like. For instance, what experiences, specifically, are people taking into this eternal reading room and how is it possible those experiences haven't been influenced by a culture that itself has been influenced by the art/literature they'll be experiencing? What's more, how is it possible to read that much and not gain an appreciation of the evolution of influence? Is it fair to read all the authors influenced by Shakespeare before reading Shakespeare? Is it fair to THEN read Shakespeare and think "well, all of this is trite and cliched because I've read it all in later authors"? You say you think critics give too much credit to who came first, but this is why: it's very likely the qualities you appreciate in a modern author were actually influenced by an older author, and if you're going to praise those qualities, would you not rather praise higher the artist in which they originated?


I've read Chaucer and I don't pretend to be an expert but that just seems untrue to me and I question how many people (in universities especially) are expert enough to actually make a critical judgement on Chaucer's writing - especially given that it's middle english. But you'll get Bloom going on about the strength of the writing and evocativeness and all that and it just feels like wind to me, in the same way a critic can blather on for half a page about the magnificent use of suspense in Psycho. Are you familiar with the website pitchfork music? The reviewers there are experts in saying a lot about a record in ecstatic vagueries and I feel like most criticism is just that.You said earlier you don't read much criticism yet somehow you've read enough to say that most of it is "ecstatic vagueries?" Well, I do read a lot of criticism, and while I'd readily admit there is plenty of critics that engage in "ecstatic vagueries" (what I call "opinion vomiting"), there also just as many that actually study and analyze literature in an effort to illuminate how it works: Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, William Empson, Helen Vendler, etc. are just a few that steer away from "ecstatic vagueries." I'd also wonder what critics you've seen "blather on for half a page" about the suspense in Pscho; if anything, the suspense in Hitchcock's films are a given, and takes a back seat in critical studies to technique, psychoanalysis, and sociological theories.


I've also heard it asserted by people like Roger Ebert that Charlie Chaplin remains the funniest comedy in film... total bunk in my opinion. I've read dissertions on the masterful portrayel of Stanley by Marlon Brando in A Streetcar named Desire and to me the performance is crap and does not hold up today. Modern actors give better performances.Again, you're viewing things in a bubble. Chaplin was arguably the first screen comedian to take full advantage of the new medium and its possibilities for visual comedy. He also tended to tug at people's heart strings with his sentimentality, and many still cite City Lights as one of the most poignant films ever made. He was also one of films first auteurs, controlling most every aspect of his films from the writing, direction, designs, acting, editing, and even scoring. Personally, I think Buster Keaton is far funnier and I'm being absolutely honest when I say that no modern comedies either on TV or in film makes me laugh as much as Keaton, even his short films like the ingenious One Week. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qFXR35oBKw) Brando was a similarly influential actor as he almost single-handedly popularized "method" acting. Before him, most film actors used the same kind of classical stage acting that, while it worked in the theater, looked too artificial on-screen. Brando brought an unheard of level of naturalness and set the standard by which all subsequent actors could be judged. Also, it's usually his performance in On the Waterfront, rather than Streetcar, that's held up as the pinnacle. Do I think there have been better since then? Yes; I'd especially mention Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot and DeNiro in Raging Bull (and maybe O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia), but all of them came long after and learned a lot from Brando.


Film is also a medium where a few decades have brought enormous technical leaps forward when it comes to capturing an image and more sophisticated, more readily available film cameras and equipment mean that independent film making is becoming easier and easier, yet despite all of thesee massive improvements in technology, despite all the directors and film makers who learned from people like Hitchcock and decades of new and innovative film the BEST movies are still Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai and Vertigo? So how come nobody has managed to upstage them.Technical innovations don't equal artistic innovations. It would be like saying adding colors to a painter's palette or inventing better paint brushes would make them paint better; there's still no substitute for imagination and creativity. Moving away from films, in photography so many modern photographers are obsessed with cameras and lenses and tripods and how well they "measure" when tested; one critic called them "measurebators" and said they were far more interested in technology than art. None of them will ever produce better photographs than Steichen was back in the 20s, or Cartier-Bresson was in the 50s, because the real art of photography is in the eye and mind, not in the camera.

Film is the same way. It hasn't bettered Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Kubrick, Welles, et al. because technology, while it makes it easier to make films, doesn't make it any easier to make BETTER films. Hollywood now produces special effects blockbusters as if they were on an assembly line, all full of the latest and best CGI and camera contraptions that money can buy... and most of them seem as if they were written by and for teenagers exclusively. There's no ART, there's just LOOK WHAT I CAN DO, MOM!!! MOM!!! MOM!!! ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME!!!? ostentatiousness. We go back to Citizen Kane and Vertigo and Seven Samurai because these filmmakers were using the unique tools of cinema to add depth and richness and complexity to the stories they were telling, not just to show off what they were capable of. When Hitchcock invented the Hitchcock zoom, it wasn't to show off (he said he'd had the technique in mind for years before he ever used it), but rather to put the audience in the subjective mind of its vertiginous lead character. When Welles experimented with deep-focus photography, it likewise wasn't to show off, but, eg, to show in one shot how the innocent childhood of Kane, going on in the background, is being demolished and permanently scarred by his parents in the foreground.

So, to summarize: technology advances, art just changes, and not necessarily for the better.


I was reading Eberts review of Herzogs remake of Nosferatu; in the review Ebert asserts that Herzog 'as nearly as possible' manages to capture the eerie atmosphere and suspense of the original. What hogwash, the original is only a good film to a modern audience in that it is a recognized classic... Herzogs version is much the better film, but of course suggesting that amounts to some sort of sacrilige.

I'll put Herzogs filmography up against Hitchcocks anyday.I don't think it amounts to sacrilege; Herzog is a widely respected filmmaker and his Nosferatu is a widely respected film. It's not like you're saying Coppola's Dracula is better than Murnau's. Personally, I've never been a big fan of Herzog and if I were going to pick a vampire film to declare better than Murnau's it would be Dreyer's semi-silent version from the early 30s. Both Murnau and Dreyer were consummate visual artists, the former with an actual background in art and it shows in his films. They have a pictorial beauty that you just don't find much any more. Herzog is also a visual-minded director but his imagery has just never resonated with me like it has others and his quirks tend to get on my nerves more often than not. Of that German New Wave I vastly prefer Wenders.

[JCamilo]

Plus, I think it is a bit of hiperbole when people say Shakespeare, Dante, Homer are the best, etc. Not just because they have added to their artistic merit, the historical, but it is very easy to find arguments for several authors (the best of Chekhov, Tolstoy, Joyce, Tennyson, Racine, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Melville, Yeats, Borges, Kafka is probally as good as the best of Dante or Shakespeare if you think, how well they wrote). A masterwork may demand some special conditions other than a very talented writer, but the simple overwhelming truth is how many times Shakespeare peaked at this higher level, How many times Dante did to come with the Comedy, how many times Homer did to come with both Iliad or Odissey, Virgil to come with his major poems, Ovid to come with Metamorphosis, Ariosto with Orlando (since those epic poems are not good for one chapter, but usually a handful of those chapters).

If anything, we will go back to Liebniz argument about the library in heaven, if it would have only several copies of Aeneid or just one Aeneid alongisde several other works that at that point of time, had a very inferior status if compared to Virgil.

[mortalterror]

Some thoughts: the total artistic output from any culture from any time is immense. Even in cultures where literacy was not widespread and only a certain group have access to the tools necessary for art, everything that's produced cannot possibly survive. So cultures have to be selective in deciding what to pass on to the next generation. Sometimes, especially when it comes to ancient works, the selection may be somewhat arbitrary (as things like wars can wipe out cultural/artistic productions and what's "passed on" is literally what survives), but each subsequent generation gets to weigh in; and the next generation includes critics, artists, and the public. When it comes to authors like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, et al., they've not only survived this temporal trial, but each generation seems to produce quite a few people that find them to be as great and relevant as every prior generation has. That's how canons get formed.
True dat. I wish we had the 90 or so other plays Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides each wrote, the paintings of Appelles, and more sculptures of Praxiteles.


If you consider the elite of the elite authors, those that have survived for centuries, they constitute probably less than 1% of all authors that have ever written, or maybe even that survives. Given that statistic, of course it's improbable that we will see another such in our time. It's against the odds for each generation to produce a Dante or Shakespeare and not every generation is equally likely to. Dante and Shakespeare, especially, came along when they had a chance to be amongst the first to really innovate and solidify their language through their art. The ground they covered was so immense, that subsequent authors tend to have to stake out smaller and smaller grounds to establish themselves. That combination of breadth and depth is difficult to equal.
I think Dante and Chaucer would be the closer analogy to early formations of a language, and that sort of impact. But the thing about Chaucer, Dante, and Shakespeare is that they were more summation artists rather than original innovators. Ezra Pound talks about the two different types in ABC of Reading. You can sort of see Dante as summing up medieval thought and Shakespeare as summing up Renaissance thought. I don't think it's that other authors had nowhere to go to differentiate themselves, but rather that they don't have the same scope of vision or aren't attempting the same kind of broad all encompassing vision of epic scale like a Michelangelo, a Wagner, or a Tolstoy.


As for critics, I don't think all critics come to the same opinions. Not every literary critic is as obsessed with Shakespeare as Bloom. Pretty much every critic has their favorites and those they feel are overrated or those whose influence/importance they can appreciate intellectually, but don't feel them emotionally. I think pretty much everyone on here would say the same thing. I do adore Shakespeare and Milton, but I much prefer Virgil to Homer and I think the quality of writing in Chaucer was really variable (some brilliant, some godawful). Likewise, I'm sure we all authors we feel are grossly underrated, especially when it comes to more recent authors. Everyone around here probably knows my love for James Merrill by now; most don't even know who he is. When it comes to contemporary literature, it's our responsibility to argue for our favorites and against our least favorites to influence what the next generation is exposed to. Of course, with modern technology and the widespread availability of art from everywhere and every time, it's easier for individuals to follow their own tastes and not be so influenced by the canon.
Yeah, that Merill pick has always thrown me sort of like your picking End of Evangelion as the greatest movie ever. But I find it's actually pretty common among guys who read as many books or watch as many movies as you do to have eclectic tastes and overvalue things like novelty. To each his own.


As St. Lukes said, this just isn't the world we live in and it's difficult to imagine what it would be like. For instance, what experiences, specifically, are people taking into this eternal reading room and how is it possible those experiences haven't been influenced by a culture that itself has been influenced by the art/literature they'll be experiencing? What's more, how is it possible to read that much and not gain an appreciation of the evolution of influence? Is it fair to read all the authors influenced by Shakespeare before reading Shakespeare? Is it fair to THEN read Shakespeare and think "well, all of this is trite and cliched because I've read it all in later authors"? You say you think critics give too much credit to who came first, but this is why: it's very likely the qualities you appreciate in a modern author were actually influenced by an older author, and if you're going to praise those qualities, would you not rather praise higher the artist in which they originated?
I don't know about that. I prefer Shakespeare's sonnets to Petrarch's or Wyatt's.


You said earlier you don't read much criticism yet somehow you've read enough to say that most of it is "ecstatic vagueries?" Well, I do read a lot of criticism, and while I'd readily admit there is plenty of critics that engage in "ecstatic vagueries" (what I call "opinion vomiting"), there also just as many that actually study and analyze literature in an effort to illuminate how it works: Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, William Empson, Helen Vendler, etc. are just a few that steer away from "ecstatic vagueries." I'd also wonder what critics you've seen "blather on for half a page" about the suspense in Pscho; if anything, the suspense in Hitchcock's films are a given, and takes a back seat in critical studies to technique, psychoanalysis, and sociological theories.
Matthew Arnold, Sainte-Beuve, C.S. Lewis, I.A. Richards, and Edmund Wilson also aren't bad.


Again, you're viewing things in a bubble. Chaplin was arguably the first screen comedian to take full advantage of the new medium and its possibilities for visual comedy. He also tended to tug at people's heart strings with his sentimentality, and many still cite City Lights as one of the most poignant films ever made. He was also one of films first auteurs, controlling most every aspect of his films from the writing, direction, designs, acting, editing, and even scoring. Personally, I think Buster Keaton is far funnier and I'm being absolutely honest when I say that no modern comedies either on TV or in film makes me laugh as much as Keaton, even his short films like the ingenious One Week. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qFXR35oBKw)
Try the Jackass movies or Wildboyz. They are the comedic descendants of slapstick comedy today. The gap between the eras was filled by the Three Stooges and Warner Brothers cartoons. I tend to see them all as an unbroken link stretching back to the Vaudeville days and before that Commedia Dell'Arte.


Brando was a similarly influential actor as he almost single-handedly popularized "method" acting. Before him, most film actors used the same kind of classical stage acting that, while it worked in the theater, looked too artificial on-screen. Brando brought an unheard of level of naturalness and set the standard by which all subsequent actors could be judged. Also, it's usually his performance in On the Waterfront, rather than Streetcar, that's held up as the pinnacle. Do I think there have been better since then? Yes; I'd especially mention Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot and DeNiro in Raging Bull (and maybe O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia), but all of them came long after and learned a lot from Brando.
Shouldn't Constantin Stanislavski get the credit here?

Plus, I think it is a bit of hiperbole when people say Shakespeare, Dante, Homer are the best, etc. Not just because they have added to their artistic merit, the historical, but it is very easy to find arguments for several authors (the best of Chekhov, Tolstoy, Joyce, Tennyson, Racine, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Melville, Yeats, Borges, Kafka is probally as good as the best of Dante or Shakespeare if you think, how well they wrote). A masterwork may demand some special conditions other than a very talented writer, but the simple overwhelming truth is how many times Shakespeare peaked at this higher level, How many times Dante did to come with the Comedy, how many times Homer did to come with both Iliad or Odissey, Virgil to come with his major poems, Ovid to come with Metamorphosis, Ariosto with Orlando (since those epic poems are not good for one chapter, but usually a handful of those chapters).

If anything, we will go back to Liebniz argument about the library in heaven, if it would have only several copies of Aeneid or just one Aeneid alongisde several other works that at that point of time, had a very inferior status if compared to Virgil.
I agree. Personally, I like Best of compilation CDs, although my friends say those are sacrilege and a record ought to be listened to in toto, since it's a unified work of art. I like highlight reels and anthologies. I even put a sort of scrapbook together with my favorite passages and poems, just so I wouldn't have to root through an entire library every time I wanted to read my favorite part of a book. Lots of guys have A+ material. Guys like Dante and Homer just managed to turn out a higher volume of A+ material.

[MorpheusSandman]

I think Dante and Chaucer would be the closer analogy to early formations of a language, and that sort of impact. But the thing about Chaucer, Dante, and Shakespeare is that they were more summation artists rather than original innovators.Shakespeare's Early Modern English is distinctly different than Chaucer's Middle English, though if we consider them both English then Chaucer was indeed the important predecessor. You make a fair point about original innovators VS summation artists, but I think in many ways the summation artists are where most go as the source to see all of the innovations of the time in one place. One could say the same about Citizen Kane; nothing it did was wholly original, but it was the first film to combine all of those techniques into a single film, so we look back at it to study rather than tracing the innovations back to their very first examples (if such a thing is even traceable).


Yeah, that Merill pick has always thrown me sort of like your picking End of Evangelion as the greatest movie ever. But I find it's actually pretty common among guys who read as many books or watch as many movies as you do to have eclectic tastes and overvalue things like novelty.I wouldn't say it's the novelty I appreciate in either; there are far more novel works in both mediums that I like and appreciate less. Rather, I think it's the combination of the immensely high level of subjective, personal love and objective, impersonal appreciation I have for both. They're works that move me personally, yet I feel I can argue that they have objective qualities that, regardless of one's personal feelings, deserve respect and admiration. With most works I lean more heavily one way or the other; my favorites are those that are on the highest level in both regards.


Try the Jackass movies or Wildboyz. They are the comedic descendants of slapstick comedy today. The gap between the eras was filled by the Three Stooges and Warner Brothers cartoons. I tend to see them all as an unbroken link stretching back to the Vaudeville days and before that Commedia Dell'Arte.I just saw Bad Grandpa a few weeks back. It's not that I haven't watched or enjoyed a lot of contemporary comedy, it's just that it rarely blows my mind in the way Keaton does. He was more than just slapstick; watch the finale of One Week with the spinning house in the hurricane where it's destroyed by the train. All of the physical contraptions in Bad Grandpa, while funny, were crude by comparison. OK, yes, there's a coin-operated horse (or whatever it was) that launches him through a store window... I'd like to see Johnny Knoxville manage the scene where Keaton is running around the spinning house and dives through the door in a single take; then inside spins around the room and back out the door in another single take. And that's in a relatively "minor" short, not even on the level of the massive set-pieces in the climaxes of his feature films. There's nothing in post-silent comedy that top the level of physical and visual skill and imagination that Keaton had. It's what raises slapstick from just being funny to being a genuine art-form.


Shouldn't Constantin Stanislavski get the credit here?Well, you can credit Stanislavski for creating and teaching the method, but Brando was the one that really signaled the shift towards it and away from the classic style.

[mortalterror]

I just saw Bad Grandpa a few weeks back. It's not that I haven't watched or enjoyed a lot of contemporary comedy, it's just that it rarely blows my mind in the way Keaton does. He was more than just slapstick; watch the finale of One Week with the spinning house in the hurricane where it's destroyed by the train. All of the physical contraptions in Bad Grandpa, while funny, were crude by comparison. OK, yes, there's a coin-operated horse (or whatever it was) that launches him through a store window... I'd like to see Johnny Knoxville manage the scene where Keaton is running around the spinning house and dives through the door in a single take; then inside spins around the room and back out the door in another single take. And that's in a relatively "minor" short, not even on the level of the massive set-pieces in the climaxes of his feature films. There's nothing in post-silent comedy that top the level of physical and visual skill and imagination that Keaton had. It's what raises slapstick from just being funny to being a genuine art-form.
Haven't seen Bad Grandpa yet, but the end of Jackass 2 has a parody of Busby Berkeley and ends with Johnny Knoxville having a house fall on him a la Buster Keaton. I also forgot to mention that Jackie Chan is another influential slapstick/stunt artist of comedy/action. He's done homages to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd too in his films, like having a building fall on him or hanging from a clock tower. And that scene from Police Story where he's chasing the bus is as good as anything Keaton ever did. Try watching from the part right after the shootout where the chase through the shanty town starts.

I just watched the spinning house scene in Keaton's One Week. It's really not that elaborate. You're basically just placing the house on top of a carousel wheel and slowly spinning it while Keaton jumps in then out. It's sort of a cheap trick like Fred Astaire's dancing on the ceiling in Royal Wedding. Keaton did stuff way more impressive and funnier than that in movies like Sherlock Jr. and The General. But I see what you are saying about the technical sophistication of Keaton's stunt work. With Johnny Knoxville and the other Jackass guys the jokes are stripped down to their essential ingredients like set up/punchline, whereas with Keaton you have variations, elaborations, the call back, reversals, and other comedy techniques. It's like the difference between the rapid fire stand up and the storyteller stand up.


Well, you can credit Stanislavski for creating and teaching the method, but Brando was the one that really signaled the shift towards it and away from the classic style.
In the US maybe. Or maybe just in US cinema. Personally, I believe that Brando get's overrated and John Gielgud acted circles around him in Julius Caesar. I'd like to see what the consensus is on who the twentieth century's greatest actor is abroad. Something tells me there are going to be a lot of dark horses from Russian cinema or maybe men who only acted in theater. Probably see Toshiro Mifune, Marcello Mastroianni, and Max Von Sydow, in the running among others.

[MorpheusSandman]

Haven't seen Bad Grandpa yet, but the end of Jackass 2 has a parody of Busby Berkeley and ends with Johnny Knoxville having a house fall on him a la Buster Keaton. I also forgot to mention that Jackie Chan is another influential slapstick/stunt artist of comedy/action.Jackie Chan is amazing as well, but not as funny as Keaton since most of his stuntwork/slapstick is done in the context of martial arts action rather than physical comedy, and most of the comedic moments are merely moments rather than something happening in the context of a comedic story. That said, he's definitely one that can match Keaton's physical talents. I hear what you're saying about the Jackass guys but, again, I watched Jackass 2 and my only thought was "Keaton did it better."


I just watched the spinning house scene in Keaton's One Week. It's really not that elaborate... Keaton did stuff way more impressive and funnier than that in movies like Sherlock Jr. and The General.Oh it's absolutely not that elaborate and I certainly agree about Sherlock Jr. and The General (and most of his features, really; ever seen the ending of Seven Chances?) being superior. In fact, the hurricane that ends Steamboat Bill Jr. is basically One Week on a much larger scale. I only linked to One Week because it's a short film (easier for someone to watch as opposed to asking them to watch a feature) and my point was that even in a relatively minor/simple set-piece like that I think he's more talented/sophisticated than what I see out there now. Still, doing all of that in a single take can't be easy and had to have taken several attempts... and, c'mon, the train missing the house only to have the second one demolish it is ingenious misdirection! I smile just thinking about it.


In the US maybe. Or maybe just in US cinema. Personally, I believe that Brando get's overrated and John Gielgud acted circles around him in Julius Caesar. I'd like to see what the consensus is on who the twentieth century's greatest actor is abroad. Given US cinema's dominating influence on world cinema, I'd hesitate to limit anything that was important in US cinema to ONLY being important in US cinema. There are certainly many great, great actors abroad but I still doubt if any had the widespread influence of Brando. I mean, Brando isn't even a personal favorite, but I don't think the reverence he receives is limited to just the US. Someone like Toshiro Mifune may be extraordinary, but did he really influence anyone? He strikes me as someone whose style was so unique that it could only work with him and with a director who didn't mind the expressive, almost expressionistic style of theatrical acting. Mifune has a physical presence that few actors possess, but comparing him to Brando is really apples to oranges. I do agree Gielgud was better than Brando in Julius Caesar, but Gielgud is probably one of the 4 or 5 greatest Shakespearean actors of the 20th century, so for him to outdo Brando in a genre that Brando was quite new to is hardly a major knock against Brando.

[mortalterror]

Jackie Chan is amazing as well, but not as funny as Keaton since most of his stuntwork/slapstick is done in the context of martial arts action rather than physical comedy, and most of the comedic moments are merely moments rather than something happening in the context of a comedic story. That said, he's definitely one that can match Keaton's physical talents. I hear what you're saying about the Jackass guys but, again, I watched Jackass 2 and my only thought was "Keaton did it better."
I'll give you that, but personally I think that Chaplin was the greatest comedic actor of the twentieth century. For instance, the drowning scene and boxing scene in City Lights are two of the funniest things I've ever seen. I watch Keaton and while I'm impressed by his tricks, they don't make me laugh like Chaplin does. Chaplin has the grace of a ballerina, whereas Keaton is more like an athletic football player. By the way, that scene where Keaton is about to be tackled and hands the ball to another guy is hilarious even if it isn't technical or sophisticated. I don't know which film it was in, but I saw it in a clip montage. I also really love that stunt he did where the three guys are walking on each other's shoulders through the alley, he jumps out the third story window of one building and then into the third story window of another.


Oh it's absolutely not that elaborate and I certainly agree about Sherlock Jr. and The General (and most of his features, really; ever seen the ending of Seven Chances?) being superior. In fact, the hurricane that ends Steamboat Bill Jr. is basically One Week on a much larger scale. I only linked to One Week because it's a short film (easier for someone to watch as opposed to asking them to watch a feature) and my point was that even in a relatively minor/simple set-piece like that I think he's more talented/sophisticated than what I see out there now. Still, doing all of that in a single take can't be easy and had to have taken several attempts... and, c'mon, the train missing the house only to have the second one demolish it is ingenious misdirection! I smile just thinking about it.
I thought the one where he was trying to commit suicide on the tracks, closes his eyes, and the train derails right in front of him was funnier, but I see what you are saying. I'll catch Seven Chances later. Thanks for the recommendation.


Given US cinema's dominating influence on world cinema, I'd hesitate to limit anything that was important in US cinema to ONLY being important in US cinema. There are certainly many great, great actors abroad but I still doubt if any had the widespread influence of Brando. I mean, Brando isn't even a personal favorite, but I don't think the reverence he receives is limited to just the US. Someone like Toshiro Mifune may be extraordinary, but did he really influence anyone? He strikes me as someone whose style was so unique that it could only work with him and with a director who didn't mind the expressive, almost expressionistic style of theatrical acting. Mifune has a physical presence that few actors possess, but comparing him to Brando is really apples to oranges. I do agree Gielgud was better than Brando in Julius Caesar, but Gielgud is probably one of the 4 or 5 greatest Shakespearean actors of the 20th century, so for him to outdo Brando in a genre that Brando was quite new to is hardly a major knock against Brando.
I know that American cinema has a global presence but a lot of people's watching habits are still regional. That means their favorite movies like their favorite books are often going to be the ones produced in their own language, by artists in their own borders, taught in schools as their national cinema. Take France for instance, I think they have a law where something like 50% of movies shown in theaters have to be home grown. Canada does that sort of thing with it's television so that it's native culture doesn't get washed out by the American programming. Then you have the different tastes in film around the world. Europeans just do not have the same taste in film as Americans. That's plain as day when you compare the Academy Awards winners to the Cannes Film Festival winners or the Venice Film Festival Winners. In Mexico, horror films are supposed to be way bigger than they are in the US.

Plus, sometimes people can be huge stars in Asia and we never hear about it over here. The Chinese Spring Festival gets watched by about a billion people every year. The Chinese news show Xinwen Lianbo used to get 200 million viewers now it gets about 135 million a day. You want to talk popular? There was a Mexican sitcom that used to get 350 million viewers called El Chavo Del Ocho, that I had never heard of until a few months ago. We like to think everyone watches the same stuff as we do, but the truth is every country has it's own David Letterman or Regis Philbin. Bollywood makes more movies than Hollywood now. Not many Americans watch them here, but Indian actors probably have hundreds of millions of fans in places like Singapore, Pakistan, India, and all around that region.

Sometimes foreign countries see their cannon differently than Americans and other English speakers do. Have you ever checked out that Hong Kong Film Awards list of the 100 greatest Chinese films? I sure as heck wouldn't have picked Spring In a Small Town as the best Chinese film of all time. Who knows what criteria they are judging films by over there? Another example is I've heard that Kurosawa films are popular in America as well as Japan, but in America his samurai movies are the favorites but in Japan the contemporary films are the favorite. Also, just based on the geographic proximity, Japanese film fans are going to see more Russian and Chinese films than American audiences.

Let's try and bring this back to literature. If you asked a litnet member about great French authors, they might name Victor Hugo. But they'd probably do it on the basis of his novels, whereas a French person would probably name him on the basis of his poetry. The American knows Moliere is a great French playwright, but usually hasn't even heard of Racine.

I don't know enough about actors to say for certain who is the best in the world, or who is the most influential. But I wonder if you asked a Frenchman who the greatest actor was if he wouldn't say Gerard Depardieu instead of Marlon Brando. If you asked a Brazilian who the greatest athlete of the 20th century was would he say Muhammad Ali, or would he say Pele?

Case in point, Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monde's_100_Books_of_the_Century vs Modern Library's 100 Best Novels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Library_100_Best_Novels Le Monde shows a French bias and Modern library shows an English/American bias.

[AuntShecky]

Only on the LitNet can there be found references to Dante and Johnny Knoxville on the same thread! Honesty, NitLetters, it may be fun to express opinions as to who is the "best," but a far more fruitful activity might be spending time reading the works themselves. Just throwing that out there.

"Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like your opinion, man." --The Big Lebowski