In the prologue to his first collection of essays, The Dyer’s Hand (1962), W.H. Auden explains why criticism is inescapably personal: Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures that we enjoy, it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else’s. All the judgments, aesthetic or moral, that we pass, however objective we try to make them, are in part a rationalization and in part a corrective discipline of our subjective wishes. Therefore, Auden insists, as a matter of professional honesty critics should detail their “dream of Eden”—their notion, say, of a perfect day—up front so that readers will be able to judge their judgments. To that end he proposes a short questionnaire that would provide “the kind of information I should like to have myself when reading other critics,” including their preferred “Sources of Public Information” and “Public Entertainments”—in his case, respectively, “Gossip.…