Well, the great poet in esteem up until recently was Virgil - literature was Virgil and Ovid, and then Cicero in prose. Petrarch for 100 years was regarded as a great Latin prose stylist and not the vernacular poet who would recreate Western verse in his image. The actual attitude of Western literature was more in line with Mortalterror's general aesthetic than with Bloom's up until, well, Bloom's time (1950s or so). Homer was revered, respected, and unread until a Greek resurgence, and even then it was Plato who was turned to first turned to (especially Erasmus).
As for when it did come, well, the language people were writing was already from Virgil - the invention of Blank verse itself was in a translation of Virgil - Hamlet is haunted by Virgil, not Homer. Homer until even after the Renaissance, and in terms of quality of verse, Virgil was still, and arguably is still, seen as the supreme artist, over Homer.