The most popular poem of all time?

There once was a man from Nantucket...

That may well be a good answer to what I considered an unanswerable question...

I bet it's some kind of nursery rhyme or limerick...

Curious...

the most popular poem ever? in any language? what does 'most popular' mean? i bet china would have a few that go way way way back and many people still know.
if you specify that it's in english speaking world (and exclude India and other former colonies), then it's easier... but not comprehensive. It is an unanswerable question, i believe.

Well, if most of those who live in China agree on one poem, then that'd likely be the most popular world-wide given that China has the largest population of any country.

If it's a popular poem that has been translated into several languages, does one count all renditions? If it's a poem that changes during translation to a similar poem, but not quite the same, does that count as one poem or two?

let's say it counts as one. what you got?

I don't know nothing about poetry. Just trying to define the search parameters.

There once was a man from Hongkong...

Pushkin's Bronze Horseman or tale of Tsar Saltan....

Those are surely great poems, but hardly the 'most popular poems ever'.

A lot of religious liturgy qualifies as poetry.

What about the XXIII Psalm (King James Version)?

well, for me the most popular should be "All things bright and beautiful."

Or those poems they make you recite during pre-school and kindergarten.

Fleas

Adam
had'em.

Certainly the shortest if not most popular.

Funny you should ask- I have an anthology entitled "Famous Poems: An Anthology of Old Favourites" by W. G. Bebbington. In the preface he says "it is a collection of the most anthologised poems" which you can take as being the most popular, perhaps. It has 132 poems so I am not going to list them all here.
Ofcourse there is Shakespeare, Milton, Nashe, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Lord Byron, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Bronte, Hopkins, Tennyson, Carroll, Yeats, de la Mare, Eliot, amongst others.
I suppose something by Shakespeare would be one of the most popular.