Kyle Gann posted a long, thoughtul piece called "Composing Outside One's Time," in which he discusses a music student who "was blown away by 16th-century counterpoint early in his education, [whose] music has remained intransigently tonal." Gann has had lengthy discussions with a colleague about this student, and Gann has come down on the side of supporting the student in his work without telling him that what he is doing is not "modern" enough: "If living composers as disparate as Pärt and Picker can become incredibly successful staying within a single diatonic scale, who am I to tell my student that what he's doing isn't 'modern' enough?"

I'm trying to imagine a creative-writing teacher telling someone who has immersed himself in writing works in the style of The Faerie Queene something similar.