Great Regulars: Poetry has no serious contenders

as the English national art. Ah, it is often said, but Shakespeare wrote plays. And so he did. But consider these plays. Hamlet is a weird drama made magnificent by a torrent of peerless poetry, and I have always thought of it as a long poem whose cosmic structure seems to pivot on the words "We defy augury". Shakespeare is the greatest playwright on earth, but he is heaven's poet. And the list of his poet-compatriots--Chaucer, Browning, Dryden, Wordsworth, Clare, Donne, Auden, Tennyson, Keats, Pope, Herbert, etc. etc.--closes the case. We are a nation defined by and consisting of poets. To deny this is to deny England.

from Bryan Appleyard: Selected Articles, from The Liberal: Poetry and the English Imagination

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