C. E. M. Joad quote

[SigniferOne]

René Rapin ... Is he a fair member of the jury?

And why not? We're talking about the whole of modern European history are we not? Plus he was a highly prominent French critic of the 17th century, along with Boileau who said pretty much the same estimation, and Boileau was the leading 17th century critic for the whole of Europe, the "dictator of Parnassus", who modeled several of his Satires on the Satires of Juvenal. Then you have Le Bossu's "Treatise on the Epic Poetry" (1675), where he teaches principles of epic poetry as drawn exclusively with examples from Virgil (and a few from Homer). In England it was much the same, Dryden (the Boileau of England) expressing several times on the inimitability of Virgil. Again, I'm not saying that you have to like this poetry, only that the numerical estimation has placed it far above modern poets. In the 19th century, due to the phil-Hellenic reaction Homer was put in his place, but the estimation of modern authors remained pretty much unchanged.