Ancient Vs. Modern

I've been reading Jonathan Swift's book A Tale of Tub and Other Satires and have become quite intrigued. There is one essay he wrote about called The Battle of the Books. He wrote it in a time when ancient learning and modern learning were fighting for power. I got to thinking...wouldn't it be cool if characters from all sorts of famous and infamous books were to come together in one big book? Of course it would take forever to do something like that...for whoever wrote it would have to have permission to use whomever characters he or she would like from other books, plus they would have to gather info about the characters. Something like that sounds awesome...but that's just to much work for me...I'm a poet...and that's what I am.
Then he got to talking about a bee who got stuck in a spider web "mansion". I get the feeling the spider was a symbol for modern learning because everything he said and where he lived was so structured and had facts behind it. The bee symbolized ancient learning because he inspired awe in me and also had wit and cunning about him. You see...I believe ancient books of learning and of tales inspired people to make lives for themselves and helped them to forge imagination into the world. There were much more poets and scholars in the old days than there are now...I believe that is because no one writes stories as vividly as people did in the past...nor do we weave stories of great intensity either.In my school all the girls are reading stories about guys and stupid prep cliques and the guys are reading about sports...that's it. There's no more imagination...no more creativity. I feel sorry for the next generation of readers for the talented writers of their generation will be few. But that's understandable...I mean we're very close to the destruction of ancient talents anyway. If there was just some way to put modern and ancient techniques of writing together where they would cooperate with each other...