“One drawback, and not the least, of practicing any art is that it becomes very difficult to enjoy the works of one’s fellow artists, living or dead, simply for their own sakes.
“When a poet, for instance, reads a poem written by another, he is apt to be less concerned with what the latter actually accomplished by his poem than with the suggestions it throws out upon how he, the reader, may solve the poetic problems which confront him now. His judgments of poetry, therefore, are rarely purely aesthetic; he will often prefer an inferior poem from which he can learn something at the moment to a better poem from which he can learn nothing.”
W.H. Auden, “Yeats as an Example” (Kenyon Review, Spring 1948)