I think you're both right. I agree with you Saturn about the critics--I mean Bush, Bloom, Greenblatt and Abrams and not the poets--it's what's inside the collections that counts--I've always said that--I'm famous for that statement around the English Dept. at St. Thomas, too.
But...Malia, you have a point, too. Insufferable snobs though they may be, they do propel the work and they decode it, unlock the algebra that is Keats, Spenser, Milton, Marvel, Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Tennyson, Emerson, Thoreau...etc, etc...
They give us the theories to sink our own interpretations into...and that's necessary--plus, they are ridiculously over educated--Harvard, Oxford and the like--I think maybe that's why I get jealous...

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the Truth of Imagination."