Robert Kibler asks me: > Are you suggesting that the intelligible reader of 1808 would rightly >find Pope stilted, and are you then wondering whether or not Pound will be >found stilted in ten years by our kids, as was Pope then? Answer: yes, though "rightly" is a relative term. Of course (will I be able to say "of course" in ten years?) I think Pound will last, just as Pope has lasted. But if I were to bet on literary history repeating itself, I'd remember --oh, say, the phenomenon of Wertherism. Discussing that term, _The Oxford Companion to Enbglish Literature_ says, "Goethe was later much embarrassed by this early work and by the assumption that it was autobiographical," and (if I recall Eckermann correctly) he tried to rationalize by appealing to good taste. At the beginning of the book, Goethe said, Werther was reading Homer; by the end, he was reading Ossian. Obviously the boy was going crazy. But in 1774, the date of _Die Leiden des jungen Werthers_, everybody in Europe who cared about poetry was reading Ossian. --or, if you want a lighter example, Mrs. Gaskell's _Cranford_ (1853). You'll recall that one of the characters in that novel is a set-in-her-ways old lady who can't see why anybody would waste their time reading Dickens when it's self-evident that the greatest novel ever written is _Rasselas_. I can visualize us in that position in a few years--or rather I can visualize us being thought to be in that position. -- Jonathan Morse Department of English University of Hawaii at Manoa [log in to unmask]