Homer

Poet is a term applied to a person who composes poetry, including extended forms such as dramatic verse. Poets, like any artist, exist within a cultural and intellectual tradition and generally write in a specific language, but the qualities which comprise good poetry are to some extent timeless and address issues common to all humanity.

In the English language, poets often considered to be some of the very best include Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, and T.S. Eliot. In the Western tradition, Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Goethe round out a basic list. In world poetry, Li Bai, Du Fu, Basho, and Omar Khayyám complete one defensible canon. Unfortunately, the very definition of a canon is political and personal, and so no objectivity can be pretended to. For a young poor African-American New Yorker, Patricia Smith may very well be the foremost poet who ever lived. An Australian might see the work of Banjo Paterson as epitomizing universal human values. The French may demand the inclusion of Baudelaire; a homosexual, Allen Ginsberg. No matter how large or small of a group is defined, the list of definitive poets would change, just as the notion of poetry itself cannot be strictly defined. Perhaps the best approach is simply to rely on numerous inclusionist lists:

Bad poets are sometimes called poetasters and what they write is sometimes termed doggerel.

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