The Rigid Hierarchy of Writing Ability

As I mentioned in our class meeting last Friday, I found particular interest in Stephen King's idea of the Hierarchy of Writers that exists in the writing world.  The idea that a writer's ability is predetermined and immovable; the only improvement that any writer can hope to have is in the development of his or her writing skills, but one can never change his or her status as a writer.  I disagree with King's explanation of such a hierarchy, and think that a good writer does have the ability to become someone great.  

I cannot help but think of all the writers we call great today and wonder how many people read their works and designated them to be "good".  I think that a writer's status is determined by his audience's reception of his work, and can be changed in an instant.  Think about Robert Frost for example, (this instance is fresh on my mind, only because I am taking a course on Robert Frost).  He is often recognized as one of America's greatest modern poets, yet for almost half of his life,  he struggled to get even his most famous poems published.  He wrote poems for 20 years before anyone recognized his talent.  For twenty years this man sent out countless poems and short stories, and struggled to find any publisher who was interested.  Then, almost out of no where, Robert Frost became one of the best known poets in modern day.  For the first 40 years of his life, was he regarded as a "great" poet? I doubt it.  

Surely, the majority of people today would call him great, but if he has always been great, then why was his "greatness" not recognized from the start?  If he was always a great writer (and only refined his great skills in his first 20 years of writing), then why did it take so long for that to be recognized?  

Even Stephen King, who we may categorize as a high level "good" writer.  Surely at one point during his early career, amidst all the rejection letters he received, some publisher must have thrown his stories away and slapped the "bad" writer label on Stephen King.  I guess it all comes down to this question:  Who has the authority to designate a writer to live in a specific category of greatness.  A great writer only becomes one when the world recognizes him as that.  Until then, he can be bad, good, or even almost great.  Without this mobility in the hierarchy of writers, good writers would never be recognized as great.  Stephen King writes about inevitable rejection when a writer first decides to try and get published.  If great writers were once and always great writers, then they would never get rejected.  Great writers take a journey to become great - it is not just talent that forms a great writer, but a combination of timing, public reception, luck, and circumstance.  This is why I believe that there is a degree of mobility in any hierarchy of writing ability.