This is Living Art: so runs title of Armstrong Browning Library s recent bicentennial conference on Elizabeth Barrett (1) Thirty years ago, this claim might have seemed dubious; by now, it is indisputable. The publication of multiple editions of Aurora Leigh; increasingly wide range of EBB poems included by influential textbooks; (2) appearance of an ambitious annotated critical bibliography and two separate volumes of collected essays on her work; (3) and now, for first time in over one hundred years, preparation of an extensive scholarly edition: (4) all these speak directly to poet's re-emergence as central figure for serious students of Victorian poetry. Indeed, creation of resources for studying EBB seems to have become something of an industry. What remains to be developed, however, are larger critical conversations concerning impact of such shifts, both within and beyond Victorian pedagogical canon. What company does Elizabeth Barrett Browning now keep in our curricula, for example? Robert Browning? Felicia Dorothea Hemans or Letitia Elizabeth Landon? Wordsworth? Byron? Christina Rossetti? Parliamentary Blue Books or Thomas Hood? George Meredith, Alexander Smith, and Sidney Dobell--or Augusta Webster? Harriet Beecher Stowe? Thomas Carlyle? Moreover, how might EBB's poetic migrations among courses on Victorian poetry or women's writing and, say, topics classes on condition of England; nation and empire; Transatlantic studies; ekphrasis; animal rights; or novel, signal or speak to new critical understandings of her work? (5) Part polemic, part reflection, and part history, this article can only gesture toward such discussion; but it does so in spirit of invitation. (6) To begin, then, on note of warning: marketing EBB studies is one thing; celebrating those studies, as Harold Bloom's 2002 Modern Critical Views volume underscores, is another. Here, from prefatory expressions of regret that particular critical views on offer fail truly to raise the question of aesthetic achievement of Aurora Leigh (a work which John Ruskin loved, but I, alas, do not), Bloom quickly escalates into overt attack. In universities, colleges, and schools of English-speaking world, his introduction opens, the canon wars in one sense are pragmatically over, since academies, joined by media, have replaced virtually all aesthetic and cognitive standards by considerations of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class, and other irreducible resentments. EBB (readers may be surprised to learn) has thus eclipsed her husband; and as result, it seems, Modern Critical Views has been reduced to providing volume at hand. True, Bloom suggests, there is necessary finality in surrender of standards: a considerable resistance still exists, even in 'the ruined academies.' Still, he implies, in this context, his hands are tied: I who have limped off too many canonical battlefields, acknowledge defeat in academies, and am content to carry on war elsewhere, and not in this Introduction. (7) These words may be intended to resonate with something like gravitas of Swinburne's Hymn to Proserpine: Thou hast conquered, O pale Barrett Browning. To some EBB partisans (Bloom, p. 1), they might sound more like Malvolio's threat toward end of Twelfth Night. Still, they are not to be taken lightly: for in sense, Bloom is already being revenged on whole pack of us, including his contributors. (8) For if, as Sandra Donaldson's introduction to her own fine edited critical collection notes, popular Victorian poetry textbook headnotes can no longer neatly dispatch Sonnets from Portuguese, in Bloom's words, as quite bad, or Aurora Leigh as very bad, (9) still, Chelsea House's successful marketing ensures that when many readers open their first volume of EBB criticism, they will nonetheless find serious study of that poet linked to ruin of academies. …