![]() ![]() ![]() In a sentiment of even sterner conviction than Nabokov’s ten criteria for a good reader, Auden considers reading as an art unto itself: Although he remains one of the most celebrated, beloved, and influential poets of the past century, it is in this posthumously collected aphoristic prose that Auden speaks most directly to his values, his ideas about literature and art, and his creative process. Auden (February 21, 1907–September 29, 1973) examines in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays ( public library). The separate but symbiotic rewards of reading and writing, and the skills required for each, are what W.H. “At the hour when our imagination and our ability to associate are at their height,” Hermann Hesse asserted in contemplating the three styles of reading, “we really no longer read what is printed on the paper but swim in a stream of impulses and inspirations that reach us from what we are reading.” Both reader and writer hold this transcendent communion on the page as the highest hope for their respective reward, but it is a reward each can attain only with the utmost skill and dedication. ![]() “Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone,” Rebecca Solnit observed in her beautiful meditation on why we read and write. ![]()
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