Tim,
There's an unfortunate tendency of people to want to do hagiographies of the dead while dissing the living, if just because it's more dramatic to put your wrist to your forehead and cry "Alas! We shall never again see his match!" rather than go "You know, such-and-such is really good, and he's still producing."
There's also, as Stephen King has mentioned, the trouble of people doing their doctoral disertations on authors who are still living and can call them up and tell them they're full of it. It's hard to do a speculative analysis with any credibility when Richard Wilbur can just tell us what his inspiration was for a particular poem.
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