On skill in literature

At the end of my class on Eugene Onegin on Monday, a guy asked "If it doesn't have a particularly deep meaning and it's not particularly uplifting, why is it so acclaimed? Why should we care?" Although the entirety of my lecture had been dedicated to addressing this question in a complex fashion, I didn't have a one-line answer for him other than to say that it wasn't generally a requirement for literature to have one or the other quality, and I cited Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and the suicide epidemic it had kicked off in the decades prior to Onegin as an instance (I had the timing of it wrong in my mind, Werther was published in 1774 though Goethe was still alive as Onegin came out).

But it does raise an overall question: why is skill and/or technical accomplishment not a sufficient attainment for literature? In painting (Vermeer), sculpture (Michelangelo), music (any number of people) skill and technical complexity in and of themselves are more or less considered adequate to get an artist into the canon, or at least it's understood why they are monumental accomplishments when they first are published.

With literature, it's different. We do want something more, almost from day 1, though verisimilitude often gets you brownie points in the early days.