NOTE:  I found this article on the web … an important piece of writing
       about the canon. 

No_ author was listed.  However, the website address given:          http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/canon_of_english_literature.htm

            The "Canon" of English LiteratureThe "Canon" of English Literature

Canon: n., from the Latin canon or "rule."  Originally, an ecclesiastical code

of law or standard of judgment, later any standard of judgment, usually based

upon determinate set of authorized texts, like the canonical books of the Bible,

Torah, Qu'ran, or Sutras.  In modern literature study, the "best" or "most

important" or "most representative" works of secular literature which anchor the

study of English and American literature.  In religious canons, works previously

treated as part of this set of texts but which have been excluded as inauthentic

for some reason are "apocryphal" (also, "The Apocrypha"), from the Latin

apocryphus or "spurious," itself a loan word from Greek where it means "hidden."

 In literary studies, the "canon" of an author also is a name for those works

known to have been written by her/him, as distinguished from those mistakenly or

mischievously or maliciously attributed to her/him (e.g., "Chaucer's apocrypha,"

most of which were identified and removed from the Chaucerian canon in the

nineteenth and early twentieth century).

        Until a literature has a "canon," it has been argued, it has not risen

to the level of sophistication at which it can be studied seriously by scholars.

 I would argue that the reverse is true: scholarly study creates canons by

making accurate texts available and by defining the terms by which they are

studied.  Folk literatures, for instance, tend not to have canons until scholars

have gotten into the act, collecting and correlating and analyzing the wild oral

transmission of the folk tale or song.  People might argue whether "Tune X" is

"really a blues song rather than rock and roll or rhythm and blues," but until a

canon of "blues" exists, people will tend to disagree rather hopelessly about

the facts.  When asked whether "Tune X" is "a great blues song," their opinions

will be even more divided by appeals to unstable definitions until people have

taken the time to make serious, systematic studies of the how the art is

created.

        Canonization also distorts literature and introduces predictable biases

in interpretation.  Canons of literature may fossilize their subject and reduce

its study to dry memorization for its own sake.  The rules by which the

canonical texts are selected tend to favor the powerful and to exclude or

marginalize the powerless, regardless of the merits of their work.  Or, rather,

"merit" will become unconsciously identified as a property "naturally" belonging

to the powerful, and "naturally" unavailable to the powerless.  The values and

tastes of the powerful will turn the process of canon formation and its product

into a cultural prison.  But does this mean we cannot have informed discussion

of canons without allowing them to imprison our values and tastes?  Think about

what rejecting any serious study of tastes and values will do to our

understanding of literature.

          Studying how literature is created and testing claims for its place in

the canon makes us better readers, more aware of the poets' choices and the

strategies guiding them.  Instead of stopping at "I like it" or "I don't like

it," readers will be able to talk about what "it" is, how it works, and what

kinds of beautiful or ugly effects it produces in all of its elements over time

as it unfolds.  This process aids canon formation, it is true, but without it,

we cannot communicate or fully understand what we like about literature, and it

acts upon us in ways we cannot fully understand, a dangerous cultural situation

which caused Plato to argue that we ought to ban poets from the ideal city.  Let

us welcome the poets to our city, but let us understand how their art works. 

Each of us is responsible for choosing which poets and which works to remember

 and in so doing, each of us develops an educated sense of taste

in literary practice, as well as a canon of her/his own with which to sustain

that sense of taste.

        One also can argue that canons and the scholarship which produce them

are not good for literatures, themselves, and that those habits of close

observation and careful definition can produce a kind of self-awareness that

will kill poets' creative force and the empathic appreciation of their

audiences.  That kind of scholarship is not what I am trying to teach you. 

Scholarship which respects the mystery in poets' minds and the central role of

emotional affect in audiences' responses, even while it tries to learn more

about how literature works, is the only kind worth pursuing.  Creative writers

 should look for inspiration in the practices of early writers

where they will find lost techniques and forgotten subjects they can bring to

new life in their own work.  All readers should listen patiently for the

heartbeat of these early works, hidden from us by our unfamiliarity with their

vocabulary and the rules by which they play the poets' games.  We are the

strangers in their worlds, not they in ours.