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Printable View
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A lot of poets seem compared in similar ways to Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, whether married or not, including Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, many of the Romantics, some sort of competition between William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and John Donne, Homer and Virgil (Virgil, who strived to write an epic as great as Homer), and the many ancient Greek poets and playwrights (Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and co.). Nowadays, one sees the competition between writers for various awards - the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Poet Laureate, and National Book Awards.
I think the amount of rivalry really depends on the reader more than the writers. Through every era of literature, there always seem similar trends among poets, which can come across as competition, but perhaps also a shared form of expression.
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