Poet and professor Dean Rader is working a list of the ten greatest poets for the San Francisco Chronicle. The idea is to mimic the “10 Greatest Composers” put together by the New York Times.

Let me start of by saying how pleased I am to see a major city daily writing about poetry, especially on an extended basis (the series will go on for two weeks, as Rader considers very options within the pages of the paper).  Let me also offer my two cents:

1. William Shakespeare

2. Charles Baudelaire

3. Aleksandr Pushkin

4. George Gordon Lord Byron

5. Percy Bysshe Shelley

6. Rainier Maria Rilke

7. T. S. Eliot

8. Emily Dickinson

9. Dante Aligheri

10. Walt Whitman

Runners-Up: Paul Eluard, Boris Pasternak, Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, Pablo Neruda, Edgar Allan Poe

My list is, clearly, biased to only include the western canon. This is a limitation of my own knowledge and experience, rather than a statement on world poetry. It is also biased towards English language poetry, for much the same reasons.