With its emphases on prosody and diachronic ideas of human development, this book is likely to be read in the context of the fairly recently minted school of literary criticism known as Historical Poetics. Some understanding of this school's putative positions, and objections to these, are effective ways into reflecting on the relationships between poetry and the idea of progress described here.

In a 2016 article entitled ‘What Is Historical Poetics?’ Yopie Prins sets out first to clarify, and secondly to defend, some of the school's foundational positions. She has been provoked into doing so by Simon Jarvis's objection that while historical poetics ostensibly eschews any single type of address to verse, it nonetheless appears in the majority of cases to be concerned with traditions of thinking that do not pay adequate attention to the techniques of verse composition. In a sense Jarvis's objection only says back to historical poetics what historical poetics had already said about itself. In an initial announcement for a conference entitled ‘Poetic Genre and Social Imagination: Pope to Swinburne’ at the University of Chicago in 2014, the dual concerns of the school are set out:

In this bifurcating view, ‘out to in’ reading uses ‘thinking about form – in prosody manuals, recorded performance, private correspondence, newspaper reviews’ to understand the historicity of poems. This seemingly innocuous summation contains what is for Jarvis an intractable problem. Historical poetics is principally concerned with describing historical traditions of thought which – while they perhaps conditioned readers in a given poem's time and, while arguably they should contextualize twentyfirst-century readers’ appreciation of historical poetry – either happen in prose or pay little attention to the particular technical work that constitutes writing in metrical or ‘numbered’ language.