Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
The translations from Goethe are excellent. You are certainly quite right in varying the answers in N°3; even in the German there is some monotony felt in the form,– a monotony, I would suggest, Shakespeare would have avoided. By the way, what is the meaning of “aus unseren Stall” in the poem “of lighter vein?” I could not quite equate it with your rendering.
Goethe certainly goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect that the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a 
greater poet – I cannot either admit that he was an equal. He wrote out of his intelligence and his style and movement nowhere come near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and, one might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice rather than by the very necessity of his being. He wrote his poetry as he did everything else with a great skill and effective genius, but it was only part of his genius and not the whole. And there is a touch wanting – the touch of an absolute inevitability; this lack leaves his poetry on a lower level than that of the few quite supreme poets.
When I said there were no greater poets than Homer and Shakespeare, I was thinking of their essential poetic force and beauty – not of their work as a whole. The Mahabharata is a greater creation than the Iliad, the Ramayana than the Odyssey, and either reigns over a larger field than the whole dramatic world of Shakespeare – both are built on an almost cosmic greatness of plan and take all human life (the Mahabharata all human thought as well) in their scope and touch too the things which the Greeks and Elizabethan poets could not even glimpse. But as poets – as masters of rhythm and language and the expression of poetic beauty – Vyasa and Valmiki are not inferior, but also not greater than the English or the Greek poet. I leave aside the question whether the Mahabharata was not the creation of the mind of a people rather than of a single poet, for that doubt has been raised also with regard to Homer.