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Disregarding J K Rowling and other obvious writers of non-literary fiction - although I wouldn't like to give that term a definition - the king of the overrated writers is Ian McEwan, who has not written anything worth reading for a very long time. Followed very closely be the prancing prince of dross -Martin Amis.
The most overrated writer ever was AYN RAND!
I don't think it's possible to accurately answer this question with only one writer, but since the question was posed in the singular, I'd have to say Ayn Rand, not because her writing style was necessarily bad but because her love of plutocracy and unfettered capitalism strike me as amazingly stupid and loathsome. BTW, she thought that smoking was really cool and that cigarette health warnings were some sort of socialist plot, and guess what she died of? Well, at least she proved the existence of poetic justice...
The most overrated writer ever was AYN RAND!
Yes... a mediocre writer and less-than-mediocre thinker turned into a cultural icon: a brilliant artist and profound philosopher. :sick:
No, Rand was a better writer than Wordsworth.
Maybe you don't like Ayn Rand's philosophical viewpoint but shouldn't you be judging her as a writer? I happen to find the anarchy implicit in George Orwell's philosophical viewpoint equally stupid and loathsome but have to admit he is a very good writer.Quote:
Originally Posted by Don Quixote Jr
About Salinger, i completely agree. I read his book after getting a great recommendation for it and found it lacking. It was just teenage angstQuote:
Originally Posted by Pip
Whose dystopian musings served as inspiration for what was destined to become, according to several infallible critical sources, 2007’s Videogame of the Year: BioShock! Indeed, case in point. :cool:Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
And, a bit lonely on this side of the seesaw perhaps, but my vote’s for Tolstoy/his battalion of translators...just never could get into that campy Karenin business.
Some of Coleridge's work is pretty dull, as can be Wordsworth.
Max Frisch. Montauk was practically unreadable. It jumped from scene to scene in the most confusing manner possible.
First off, apples to oranges. And secondly, Wordsworth is a beautiful poet.Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
They both wrote in the English language. As for your other assertion: Tastes vary.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Hill
But to call him overrated...
He has been put in the Canon, but he had no great influence in his day, except among the people that he associated with, and he has had little influence since. If the people who created the canon were looking for a Romantic who influenced later writing, then Byron would have been the one. Rating Wordsworth as worthy of being read is excessive, unless one trying to point out how not to write well.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Hill
Peter... it might be time to review your literary history of the period. It is fine to dislike Wordsworth; he certainly wrote a lot of schlock later in his career. It might even be fine to pass a negative judgment upon his writing abilities... as subjective as they are and as much as they conflict with the view held by many others. To suggest he had little or no influence, however, is to make a statement that is blatantly false. Harold Bloom places Wordsworth alongside of Petrarch as one of the two central innovators of Western poetry: Petrarch having "invented" Renaissance lyrical poetry and Wordsworth having "invented" Romantic/Modern poetry... the poetry "about nothing"... or "rather" about the subjective feelings and thoughts of the poet which continues to the present. Perhaps this is an exaggeration... but certainly it is an influence in which Byron, as much as I like him, cannot compare. Byron is still "about" exterior things... and Byron is still clearly within the aristocratic/Renaissance tradition.
Wordsworth has no influence excepting upon those around him. Well certainly he did have an influence on Coleridge, Shelley, and Browning... positive and negative. One would also certainly Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, both of whom ranked Wordsworth along side Milton and Shakespeare. American literature and the centrality of nature and the writer's subjective response to nature certainly influenced Emerson, Thoreau, Tuckerman... even Whitman. Just a little research will reveal Wordsworth's importance and influence on writers as different as Pushkin, John Stuart Mill, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Poe, Keats, etc... It is not a far stretch to suggest that a great majority of the English poets after Wordsworth wrestled with his influence. Admittedly there was a rebellion against his work (and more often against what he became later) as there is in emulation or adulation. In either case, he most certainly was not some unknown figure who only impacted those immediately in his own sphere of contact.
As to Wordsworth's merit... certainly suggesting that he is one of the worst writers of all time is an absurdity. I personally prefer Blake... and Keats... but Wordsworth produced a body of poetry of unquestionable beauty, to my mind... and poetry that has been more than slightly influential upon the work that followed.
You'd actually be surprised how much influence Wordsworth had in his own day - there were quite a few editions of Lyrical Ballads alone brought out in his life time. He was even made a household name - though by then he wasn't much of a poet anymore.Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
As one of my professors put it (she is a modernist scholar, with a specialty in Eliot and Richard Wilbur), "Wordsworth's Ode is the greatest 19th century poem." Certainly, that may be a stretch, but it certainly would be top five, in terms of the way it changed poetic understanding. Perhaps you may be interested in reading Abrams' Mirror and the Lamp, where he discusses the transition in poetic thought brought about by, primarily, Wordsworth.