The conservative camp in the canon debate decry the pluralist approach of the reformists. If the doors are opened too wide, truly great works will be hidden amongst the rubble of mediocrity. If the canon is to be fragmented and splintered into a multitude of special interests, conservatives feel they will find themselves in a hell of subjectivity. Instead, the conservatives argue that a canonical work has special properties that make it rise above the rest. No matter what the social processes that spawned the literary canon, the works that have survived have survived the test of centuries of high intellectual criticism.
Canonical works have an absolute and undeniable quality.
Therefore it is only through the social processes of canon formation that a piece should join the exalted ranks of Milton, Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and certainly not through the intervention of the reformists who would remake the canon in their own image. And since the canon is ever-evolving and responsive to the cultural needs of the society which supports it, the canon will eventually reflect cultural wishes and correct ideological slights in the past. Better to reform slowly than to radically overturn.