So it's the construction, not the reception, that matters?
Doug --------
Well, reception matters _as history_. It's a human activity, after all. But "matters" here bothers me. Identifying an ant as a n ant, a snowflake as a snowflake, is not something that either matters or fails to matter. It's merely an identification.
There are artifacts that matter to some people, and they talk and write about them. That's fine. I'm merely noting that identifying P as art and Q as not art (both being sries of words) is not a very useful activity. What is there, leaving 'value' aside, that differentiates "It takes a heap o' living" from Lycidas? In each case someone deliberately combined words in given pattern. As soon as you try to put them into different categories (e.g., art and non-art) you have plunged in to the morass of literary evaluation -- which can't be justified. Guest's poems provided immense human pleasure to millions of people over half a century or so. My response, probably yours, is akin to Dorothy Parker's. That's fine -- but it doesn't 'undo' the pleasure he provided people nor offer any basis for the evaluation _as human_ of those who read his verse with pleasure.
One can derive from a text (or group of texts) an implicit description of the decorum they 'seek,' and note the success or failure of that. But that doesn't establish "value"; it's merely a description. Violations of the implicit decorum may grate on the nerves of some, not of others. That's still just an empirical fact, not a basis for claiming "value." Interesting commentary on a poem usually amounts to to a description of its intrinsic decorum;, the way multiple aspects relate. Still just a description, an empirical fact, not a value judgment. That's roughly what my comment on the last line of the Iliad did: it established a decorous relationship between the 'quiet' of that last line and the endless bloodshed on the one hand, the meaningless combat of immortals on the other, and noted a generic relationship between PL & the Iliad on that basis. It does not "prove" a formal evaluatiojn.
And so forth.
Carrol