Out of Pod Experience

If you had to choose who the finest artists were as far as writing, out of the following list, how would you rate them, and who would you exclude or add to the list?

Clark Ashton Smith
Shakespeare
Poe
John Keats
Stephen King
George Martin
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Arthur Machen
Charles Baudelaire
Lewis Carroll

Maybe the list should be separated between greatest prose writers, and great poets. Whatever, too late.

I find it hard to sort them, personally, but I give Smith the top spot just for the beauty of his language. His stories weren't the greatest but you don't read an artist like Smith for the character or the story but rather the language. His art speaks of forgotten ages, of yearning for lost time and the quests to regain that time. Vintage at it's very best.

Of course, Shakespeare had many great poems, I'm still struggling to dissect Macbeth and come up with answers to everything the story poses.

"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out! Brief candle, life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sounds and furies, and signifies nothing."

Poe did a lot of great work as well, and so did Keats. I include Steve King and Georgie Boy Martin because... well, damn, they are great writers! The Dark Tower series and A Song of Ice and Fire are both unreal, even though I find the HBO series of Game of Thrones to be a bit too much like a soap opera and I think he's built up this series so much I am not sure if he can find a suitable ending for it, it is what it is, and they both have many great works other than their main series' as well, and in a diverse group of genres ranging everywhere from horror to science fiction to mystery to contemporary.

So, who is, or was, the greatest writer?

The bloke who wrote the Mr Men books.

I forgot about HP Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, neither were as good as Smith imo, but they probably deserve to be on the list.

Meh. True, but there are others that deserve that credit as well.

Of course there is natural human bias here because I am just not a big fan of Tolkien, but I don't think his writing was all that great. And his characters sing too much, which can be cool in a quasi-mythical way, but meh. I don't really care for his bushy Scandinavian settings or his British characters either but to each their own and I got to give credit where it is due of course, the man is a legend.

Hemingway.

The. Thing. About. Ernest. Hemingway. Is. That. He. Never. Used. Long. Sentences. At. All.

They don't know what to do when they get a period?

I know of one opposite.

One writer I think of as one of the worst. Not so much his story cause I guess a lot of people enjoyed it, but just because of a single chapter describing a ******* door, that I could not finish the book and wanted to shoot myself so I never have to look at it again.

That would be Nathanael Hawthorne, author of 'The Scarlet Letter' I HATED HATED HATED that book in high school

Douglas Adams was a ******* hipster doofus.

Oh I want to add Charles Baudelaire and Lewis Carroll to my list of greats.

Reading is Fun!

Playwright Eugene O'Neill.
Playwright Arthur Miller.
Mythologist, writer and lecturer Joseph Campbell.
Author and humorist Mark Twain( Samuel Clemens).
Writer Henry Miller.
Computer scientist Donald E. Knuth.
Author of Meditations Marcus Aurelius
Philosopher of communication theory and a public intellectual Marshall McLuhan.
Diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli.
Writer Thomas Paine.

List Appended.