Dave,

Try looking up a late 19th century critic name I think Tuckerman (I don't remember
his first name). A parallel phenomenon can be found in the Milton criticism of the
1960s and 1970s. I can get you some specific references there today or tomorrow.
Milton critics loved you maintain that everyone but them had given in to Eliot and
Pound on Milton and came up with all sorts of explanations for their supposed
isolation. Way back in 1900 the British scholar Walter Raleigh in a book on Milton
had called PL a "monument to dead ideas." Critics in the '60s and even late '70s
were still refuting Raleigh -- as though it is all that horrible to be a monument to
dead ideas. Dead ideas deserve a monument often. The Homeric idea of glory is I
think dead, but I would hate not to have the *Iliad* as a monument to it.

Carrol