According to Lootens, the canon is radically closed. She agrees with Alistair Fowler in seeing it as “a literary museum that could only be extended [by] the destructive attentions of a terrorist-critic” (2, qtd. in Lootens, 8). But if the canon itself is inextensible as a list, the authors and works themselves are infinitely elaborated by the existence of a discipline that generates biography and criticism, expanding upon anthology headnotes and explicating anthologized poems. In The Achievement of Literary Authority, Ina Ferris marks the moment when grub-street hacks working for publishers to puff their commodities were transformed into what Coleridge called the “clerisy”:@Samuel Taylor Coleridge (36); see also Deborah White.

Literary criticism, directed at a mass-reading public, “the Republic of Letters,” rather than the smaller, clubbish public sphere addressed by Addison, Steele, and even Johnson, now took on a clearly pedagogical function as priests of high culture explained to the masses the reasoning behind their approbation or disapprobation of cultural objects.@The advent of a mass reading public during the Romantic era has been debated (cf. Klancher to Cressy, e.g.). However, St. Clair documents a huge rise in the number of volumes printed after 1774, as well as a huge increase in bookseller’s businesses, that seem only possible given a growing market (114-120). But whether in the fantasy about readership maintained by writers or in actuality, a new, bigger reading public, extending beyond coterie or club, needed rules for reading and laws laid down for arbitrating issues of taste (Ferris 22-23). These arbiters of taste simultaneously preserve the canon as immutable words and rewrite these words by embedding them, preserved like museum pieces, in critical discourse: they make the canon simultaneously closed and open, immutable and infinitely variable.

    As Lootens points out, Palgrave, editor of Victorian poetry collections, has been called high literature’s “priest.” The evolution of books of excerpts, the way that they visually resemble quotations in literary criticism, bears out the connection between priestly anthologists and clerical critics. Rufus Griswold’s The Female Poets of America (first published in 1848) and Eric S. Robertson’s English Poetesses (published in London, Paris, and New York in 1883) – these two collections do not present poetry in traditional anthological fashion. Instead, they embed full poems in essays about the woman and her work. That could have been the form literary criticism took, and of course literary critics do occasionally quote full poems, but that exception proves the rule. What they really quote and elaborate upon are what the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century Anglo-American readers would have called “beauties.” Beauties or collections of short passages, resembling earlier commonplace books, are graphically most like the poetry we find embedded in the literary criticism that came to dominate the field. The book of beauties is visually connected to the literary critical essay, and, like it, is “design’d to advance the reader’s taste” (Goldsmith, Beauties, 1767, ii). Literary criticism as it developed in the late eighteenth century looks like a book of beauties with the interpolated commentary justifying their selection.