From Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction (pp. 105-106):
Although the poetic principle in language has waned since Homer's day, poetry as inner experience has increased. The light of conscious poetry which can irradiate a modern imagination, as it comes into contact with, say, the Homeric hexameters, is not to be compared with such fitful aesthetic gleams as must indeed have flared up now and again amidst the host of grosser pleasures preoccupying the dim self-consciousness of his own (probably half-intoxicated) audience.
I suspect one could say similar things of most literary forms and genres.
After a work-intensive weekend, I am exhausted, so you probably shouldn't expect much from me today or tomorrow....
