10                                  Carol Z. Rothkopf

In view ot Blunden's importance as a teacher, critic, essayist, edi¬
tor, and, above all, a writer about the Great War, it is curious to
have to seek him out in his present literary limbo. Since he himself
tirelessly worked at reviving the reputations of writers he thought
were being unjustly neglected by his generation—among them
James Thomson, William Collins, Christopher Smart, Henry
Vaughan, and, of course, John Clare—it is likely that Blunden
would take the long view of his own case, much as hedid that ofthe
seventeenth-century poet Vaughan:

Wherever the question ofthe survival ofthe best in poetry without
the assistance of biographers and popularisers is being debated, the
instance of.. . Vaughan should not be left out. His present fame is
one ofthe best practical arguments for the belief that the good thing
is strong enough to pass through all the obstacles and shadows of a
period into a permanent and conspicuous renown.