first and foremost, the Late Romantic trope of the artist as a unique solitary creative genius, who transcends boundaries, breaks the status quo, plumbs new depths, etc.

I’m really not sure what SM Stirling is getting at (or maybe it’s just depressingly familiar). People bash poetry for being unpopular, as if poetry is one thing, instead of the wholly complex phenomenon that it is, which includes - perhaps surprisingly - an abiding popularity. Mostly they blame TS Eliot for this alleged unpopularity, despite the fact that he is one of the most popular modern poets around. And they have very seldom read much of anything after Eliot. Or before. Why poetry doesn’t often hit bestseller lists (though every now and then it does, and the situation is quite different in Spanish-speaking countries) is to do with too many issues to talk about here. But how do you account for the popularity of the Romantic poets in their day, if they were so removed from their audience? Byron was a rock star.

Try reading Milton’s introduction to Paradise Lost and you will find that Milton (who predated the Romantics by a long shot) was the avant garde of his day and most unfussed about being accepted - he was doing something completely new. Aristotle’s Poetics, which examines tragic theatre, is about work that in its time was innovative and new. And as far as patrons and atists go, try also reading - they’re available - the letters between Renaissance painters and their patrons. Their resistances might surprise you. (And so on and so on.)

I am absolutely not into the idea of artist as genius. But great artists have never been the market-driven whores Stirling describes. Mediocre artists, very very often.

Ok, I’ve calmed down now…

Rice has her flaws, but I don’t think it can be denied that she approached the subject from a new angle and had a definite influence on the genre.

These are good points. I do think if readers find the Rice books deep and rich and special, no problemo. But it’s difficult to point to any one book and declare that this is the living example of “It” because for every person who declares it Teh Greatness, there is someone else who will pop out howling that it’s trash, no-good, yeah.

Kate and I spent a lot of time talking about this matter, not coming to conclusions to much as testing one another’s literary landscape with this or that example. I think this is why I have so much trouble with “equipoise” and “interstitial” and “The New Wave” and so forth. At least, I have trouble if I try to build walls around various books that can stand against various critical or responsive POVs. at least until I mentally translate whatever the New Thing is into “My idea of kewl stuff.”