For a brief eighty-year period, English literature courses were in the domain not just of shiny elitist failsons but also of carhops. Everyone took them. (Yes, yes; blah-blah; modulo-this-modulo-that; insert favorite social theory here to say why this was terrible terrible terrible.) Maybe just a senseless mistake, a burdening, fodder for annoyance across a boring two-dimensional political spectrum, a misapprehension of democracy and its supposedly leveling powers. Like all authoritarian machines, generative AI has in part hastened retrenchment. There are other causes of retreat, some related to the fetish of confusing tautologies with revolutionary action, others to the false requirement that literature nourish the soul at work. English will disappear from curricula as a subject, to be replaced by atomized absurdities or glorified versions of Home Ec. It will live on in elite places, though even there largely a subject of scorn, a curio box containing geniuses who may no longer be called geniuses, just products of their time before the Right People Did Their Righteous Things, fashioning their New Heaven and New Earth. They have told Milton that they have no need of him.