Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shod… - Northrop Frye

The human mind is [a poet's] individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our [the readers'] minds too. There is no self-expression in [a poet's] poem, because once the poem is there the individual [poet] has disappeared. ...there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature.

We read (experience) a text linearly, forgetting most of it while we read; then we study it as a simultaneous unit. (p. 325)

We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other. Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.