Literary History: is it possible?

So I've been thinking about literary history – not the history of literature itself (which I'm thinking about all the time, really), but the genre of literary history: you know, those kinds of books nobody seems to write anymore, the "Story of English Literature" or the "Panorama of American Letters." Just finished David Perkins's Is Literary History Possible? (Johns Hopkins UP, 1992). Perkins's conclusion is that LH is simultaneously impossible and necessary: impossible to write with anything like historical fidelity and interpretive/explanatory power, yet necessary for us to make any sense whatsoever of past writings – any sense beyond immediate subjective reactions or ideological appropriations.

This of course after Perkins had just finished his massive (I mean big – maybe 1300 pages) 2-volume History of Modern Poetry, which I'm also winding up, after reading maybe 20 pages at a stretch over the last 15 years. So there's a sense of post-praxis theoretical summing-up in Is Literary History Possible?, that the guy's just finished devoting heaven knows how many years to his big project, & is now figuring out the balance sheets on his effort. (I feel a similar brief volume on literary biography urping around Alien-like in my guts, & wonder whether I should just write the damned thing or go in for surgery.)

And I'm also reading Andrew Duncan's rich, convoluted, & often infuriating The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (Salt, 2003), and dipping guiltily into Humphrey Carpenter's Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. And in the background is this year's probably most pleasant read: Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, a dazzling & compulsively readable anecdotal history of twentieth-century "serious" music.

Now I'm young enough & saturated enough in post-structuralism & natively cynical enough to assent to Perkins's various laments about the oversimplifications, foreshortenings, & downright shortcuttages involved in literary history (& most of them apply to biography as well, mark you). But I'm also professionally foolish enough to wonder why there aren't more folks deeply invested in twentieth-century poetry studies who want to write lively, readable, compelling histories of the genre's fortunes over the past 100 or 50 years. Am I missing something? There've been a number of quite readable accounts of modernism (the one that sticks in my mind is Julian Symons's Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature 1912-1939), but no-one's done anything similar for postwar poetry, except David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (which I haven't read, alas).

I'm leaving aside such scholarly studies as ML Rosenthal's The New Poets, & other thematic studies that do a bit of literary history along the way, like Paul Breslin's The Psycho-Political Muse. But why isn't someone doing for postwar avant-garde poetry what Alex Ross does for 20th-c. "classical" music?

Yes, having written a massive foray into the institutional radioactive zone of biography, now I'm casting about for a next project (or maybe an after-the-next-project project). But I'd love input: What books have you found useful as baseline histories of postwar American & British poetry? Is Lehman any good? Are you writing this book right now, so I can stop wondering & sleep better?