Despite the saying, comparisons are not necessarily odious. They can be helpful and illuminating. But I am afraid that Ben Libman's essay on modernism (March 28) confirms it. I have absolutely no idea why anyone would want to resurrect, let alone subscribe to, one of Virginia Woolf's worst moments, when she wrote some outrageously classist comments about the "self-taught working man" who wrote "Ulysses." That comment should be allowed to die in peace. But to make it the basis for an argument is truly misguided. Surely there is a way to praise the fictions of 1925 without putting down the great modernist works of 1922 like "Ulysses" and "The Waste Land." To echo Woolf in calling those works "ultimately nauseating" is not doing a service to anyone, or to serious literary criticism. If the point is merely to say that modernism in literature was established over the decade of the 1920s, and not solely in 1922, when those two extraordinarily powerful and important works came out, why not just say that? Certainly it is true, as Libman, citing the scholar Mark McGurl, says: Hemingway's stories were extraordinarily important in the teaching of fiction-writing in creative writing programs. But why is it necessary to deny the influence of "Ulysses" and "The Waste Land" in order to make that (now quite familiar) point? Surely we can happily appreciate all these works and the influence that they had.