Levens referred to the twentieth-century cult of energy and emotion. In fact the most influential English poet of the first half of the century, T. S. Eliot, was marked by a learned allusiveness which was typically Hellenistic and Alexandrian. It would not be true to say that the Hellenistic poets have in any way ousted their predecessors in the affection of classical scholars, though we have seen major editions of Callimachus by R. Pfeiffer and Theocritus by A. S. F. Gow. But more attention has been paid to them and there have been more monumental studies of the Hellenistic Age as a whole.

Wilamowitz in his two-volume Hellenistische Dichtung in der Zeit des Kallimachos (1924) covered the poetry at length in masterly fashion, and in the same year Ph. E. Legrand in Le Poésie Alexandrine produced a little gem of sensitive interpretation. Wilamowitz included Catullus in his survey showing the debt of his more formal poetry to Hellenistic models.