The perfectly made-up thing

 It is possible, of course, to enjoy the literary-historical hall of mirrors in which traditional motif and classical allusion repeat and reflect one another for their own sweet sake, but sooner or later we will come up against the Johnsonian objection referred to earlier ["Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief," the famous remark of Johnson on Lycidas]. Essentially, this boils down to asking what after all, is the human value of the perfectly made-up thing? And the answer must be that it depends on the seriousness of what is at stake beyond the attainment of artistic finish, and on the depth of the poet's engagement with considerations other than the technical and the aesthetic. In Virgil's ninth eclogue, for example, you can sense that there is much at stake for Virgil. Again, the setting involves the kind of land grabbing that is father had suffered [which we see depicted in the first eclogue], and the deeper theme is essentially asking the question "How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?" This is the question that Shakespeare would ask fifteen hundred years later (in Sonnet 65), and it's the one which always presents itself when art feels called upon to stay power.
-Seamus Heaney, "Eclogues 'In Extremis': On the Staying Power of Pastoral"