Haja optimistas

There is one quality which unites all great and perdurable writers, you don't NEED schools and colleges to keep 'em alive. Put them out of the curriculum, lay them in the dust of libraries, and once in every so often a chance reader, unsubsidized and unbribed, will dig them up again, put them in the light again, without asking favours.

Virgil was the official literature of the middle ages, but 'everybody' went on reading Ovid. Dante makes all his acknowledgements to Virgil (having appreciated the best of him), but the direct and indirected effect of Ovid in Dante's actual writing is possibly greater than Virgil's.

Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading, New Directions Paperbooks (1934)