what the goddess of funerals has hallowed

"...he is baffled...who looks back upon the annals, and values worth by years, and admires nothing but what the goddess of funerals has hallowed."

I find it tragically amusing or amusingly tragic or neither or both that we've been having this conversation for a couple thousand years. Who started it?

Horace in the above quote from an epistle dated about 14 B.C., begins his argument against basing the value of art on its age alone. An ancient poem is not wholly perfect; just like contemporary poetry it contains only a few shining lines. New poetry will eventually grow old, unless we kill it now, but then what art will we have to console us in our old age? However...

I will continue my Dante studies later. Right now, I am chipping away at the mountain which is Andrew Motion's biography of Keats. And I am working on my death and the life-after series, or at least some sort of map of study and limitations for these I-promise-they-won't-be-morbid poems. I don't know if it makes sense to anyone else, but I prize thinking over just about everything even while I struggle to be conscious, aware, most hours of the day. That is why I love complicated poetry: the level of consciousness is so evident, maybe enough so that I can copy it.