There is, however, a certain circularity in Jackson's argument. She shows convincingly that the posthumous fame of any writer is a collaborative work. No one, however talented, can secure fame on his or her own; it takes biographers, editors and scholars to ensure that books continue to live. And since everything human is subject to fashion, there is no guarantee that the poet who inspires such devotion today will continue to inspire it tomorrow. Indeed, the mutability of taste is a commonplace of literary history. Alexander Pope was the acme of poetic genius in England, until Matthew Arnold discovered he wasn't really a poet at all, merely a "classic of our prose". John Donne was considered abstruse and over-intellectual, until T.S. Eliot seized on him as the great poet of modern consciousness, while demoting Milton to the status of a bad influence.

These revaluations—like the Pre-Raphaelites' and Yeats's embrace of Blake, which Jackson discusses—came from critics who were poets themselves. And it is generally creative artists who set the taste of their age, by teaching the public how to find what is still vital and communicative in the work of the past. So it is possible, even likely, that writers who mean little or nothing to us today will one day turn out to have the food that future writers need. And the recent poets who seem to us to have the greatest chance of immortality—Larkin and Seamus Heaney—may be known to readers a century from now only as the authors of a few lines in an anthology.

But to say that fame is dependent on intermediaries, and even on institutions—like textbooks and anthologies and pilgrimage sites—is not a scandal or a revelation. It is a tautology. What has to be explained is why it is precisely these poems and novels, not others, which inspire people to do the work and make the noise which create fame. And the only possible answer to that question is what Wordsworth called "the grand elementary principle of pleasure". As he wrote in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, "the Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being." Southey has never been more famous than Wordsworth because his work has never given as much pleasure to as many people. Sir Walter Scott, to name another of Jackson's prime examples, gave a great deal of pleasure to a great many readers for about 50 years; then he gradually started to seem boring, and now he is little read. John Clare, conversely, started out as a peasant-poet celebrity, then seemed to glide into obscurity, but now has been triumphantly revived and stands at the top of the second rank of Romantic poets.

Part of the problem with Jackson's conception of fame is that, inevitably, it is biased towards the academy, which changes its mind about poets' rank and worth more readily than what Samuel Johnson called "the common reader". Since the rise of university English studies about a century ago, the most visible and measurable part of a poet's afterlife has been in the academy—the conferences and articles and course assignments he inspires. In tandem with the decline of the general audience for poetry, this has made it seem that a poet who does not succeed in the academy is a failure, full stop. But the history of poetry is much older than the history of English departments, and it is certain that the latter will become obsolete sooner than the former. In the long run, pleasure must triumph over duty as a motive for reading, which means that poets earn immortality not in syllabuses but in the hearts of readers.

Our hearts being what they are, this kind of fame seems as if it ought to be tenuous and mutable; and yet, empirically speaking, it turns out to be, just as Shakespeare said, more durable than marble. Even if the actual number of readers who provide living sustenance for a poet's reputation, in the form of attention and love, turns out to be small—far smaller, certainly, than the audience for a movie or a song that will be forgotten in a month—that would have come as no disappointment to Milton, who hoped only to find fit audience, though few.