'Their Worlds Are Closest to Ours'

At the beginning of his 1947 lecture on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida – a play he judges “not wholly successful” -- W.H. Auden discusses “the difference between a major and a minor writer—which is not necessarily the difference between better and worse.” This theme preoccupies me. Recently I encountered yet another reviewer who dismisses the author in question as “minor,” which clearly he intends as a qualitative judgment meaning dull and just plain lousy. The designation comes off as snotty and critically lazy.Auden clarifies things: “We can forget the bad writers. The minor artist, who can be idiosyncratic, keeps to one thing, does it well, and keeps on doing it—Thomas Campion, for example, A.E. Housman, and in music, Claude Debussy.” American literature seems especially rich in excellent minor poets (Yvor Winters, Henri Coulette, Turner Cassity, Kay Ryan), in part because we have so few major poets (Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Eliot). As to classical music composers from any…