Balancing Act of Writing

What makes good literature? What are the biggest factors that play into making a good piece, ethos, pathos, logos, kairos? I think at even the most boring topic can be made interesting based on the skill of the writer. What makes a classic book? This is something that I've been trying to understand for years after reading so called "classics" such as: The Great Gatsby, Ethan Frome, Farewell to Arms, Things Fall Apart, Red Badge of Courage, Our Town, The Glass Menagerie, and the list goes on. What is it about these books that make them classics, because to me they're absolutely horrible and I hate them with a wonderful passion!
What creates a poem. What takes meaningless words and turns them into beautiful imagery. How can an author use words to make you cry, laugh, and empathize for a character in a book?! Words are amazing!
What appeals to you most in a paper or article? Ethos, pathos, logos? I think pathos can almost always catch your interest. (Except, in my case, when people start going on about the polar bear population dying off.) We are emotional creatures...or I should say I think that most of us are. If we see someone huddled over crying then you feel for them. Well I guess I should say I feel for them. Or a child who's crying over an injury. Emotions appeal to us. They're not something that we can simply be rid of as much as we would like to be at times.
Ethos is less appealing to me, depending on the subject, because someone can be a brain surgeon and lack common sense. For example, I work at Alysse's Bridal. We had a bride come in to try on dresses. She had a bachelor's or master's degree is some high tech science thing, but when she was done trying on dresses she would just throw them on the floor. These are $300-$1000 dresses. She lacked the common sense to take care of something that is nice and expensive. You can have a degree and still be a moron or lack the ability to think things through. But if the topic is very specific to their expertise I'm more likely to listen to other cures a doctor would suggest for something rather than a doctor's professional opinion on what should be done with health care, or about some other topic where their expertise is helpful, but it's more of a "What's your personal opinion" question.
Something I've also been wondering about in writing, is how do authors, in books give a better sense of time periods or passing time? I'm a hopeful author and I barely finished writing a fifteen page prologue to one of my stories. The entire thing flowed wonderfully as I wrote it, but once I finished and let it sit for a week and came back and reread it, the writing felt so choppy. Has anyone else had that happen? You feel so inspired and everything is just coming together perfectly in whatever you're writing and then you reread it later and it's absolutely horrible. Or it's choppy and broken up or there's no sense of a steady time flow shown in your writing. Anyways, interesting thought, I'd like to learn more about how author's use words to make everything so well connected in space and time and descriptions.