The author of a work of imagination is trying to affect us wholly, whether he knows it or not; and we are affecting by it, as a human being, whether we intend to be or not. I suppose that everything we eat has some other effect upon us than merely the pleasure of taste and mastication; it affects us during the process of assimilation and digestion; and I believe that exactly the same is true of anything we read.
The fact that what we read does not concern merely something called our literature taste, that it affect directly, though only among many other influences, the whole of what we are, is best elicited, I think, by a conscientious examination of the history of our individual literal education. Consider the adolescent reading of any person with some literary sensibility. Everyone, I believe, who is at all sensible to the seduction of poetry, can remember some moment in youth when he or she was completely carried away by the work of a poet. Very likely he or she carried away by the work of several poets, one after the other. The reason of this passing infatuation is not merely that our sensibility to poetry is keener in adolescent than in maturity. What happens is a kind of inundation, or invasion of an undeveloped personality, the empty room, by the strong personality of the poet. The same thing may happen at later age to persons who have not done much reading. One author takes complete possession of us for a time, then another, and finally they begin to affect each other in mind. We weigh one against the other; we see that each has qualities absent from the other; and qualities incompatible with the qualities of others, we begin to be, in fact, critical: and it is our growing critical power which protect us from excessive possession by any literary personality. The good critic - and we should all try to be critics, and not leave criticism to the fellow who writes reviews in papers - is the man who, to a keen and abiding sensibility, joins wide and increasingly discriminative reading. Wide reading is not valuable as a King of hoarding, an accumulation of knowledge, or what sometimes is meant by the term "a well-stock mind". It is valuable in the process of being affected by one powerful personality after another, we cease to be dominated by anyone, or by any small number. The very different views of life, cohabiting in our mind, affect each other, and own personality assert itself and gives each a place in some arrangement peculiar to ourself.
We, as human being, are affected by the work of author whether he is writer, poet or any other literary personality. In real, we don't read things as we have literary taste but for literary education. During youth, one is impressed by an author, then by another, and so on. With the passage of time, we got impress by multiple authors, and their qualities start to conflict each others, give birth of critic in mind, and criticism starts on one by bleating it attribute in comparison to others. However, this critical thinking is good as it protects our mind from complete possession of any author while securing self think and judgement.
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