No one takes pleasure in every kind of reading, and if we think we do we lack self-knowledge or else have “no taste at all”—no genuine appreciation of anything. But to be satisfied with our own narrowness is just as bad: there is great value in the kind of “self-conquest” that Auden recommends because it is an expansion of being, an extension of our lives into realms of experience that we would not know if we did not make the effort to enjoy those works of which our detached critical self approves.
