This description of current theories of oral composition is no more than a short account of something that is still being argued. Oral composition seems, however, the best working hypothesis, and the impact it has had on critics in Western Europe and America—and which it must eventually have on those of Italy and Germany—has been revolutionary. But the revolution is still, especially in the field of appreciation, in its destructive phase. The description of so much traditional material ‘has taken from Homeric critics a considerable body of phenomena which literary critics normally consider a legitimate and significant part of their study’. We seem to be denied the beauties of the mot juste, because the mots are not employed for their appropriateness to a specific context.