'Literature Is Closed to Them'

Yvor Winters would deny the existence of “silent” reading. Even when our lips are sealed and the room is still, we are sounding the words in our heads. I’m certain this is true when I’m writing. How else will I hear the rhythm? Rhythm is the energy that patterns our arrangement of words, the invisible but audible vitality that pleases the ear and the mind (Winters refers to “the mind’s ear”). Indifferent writers are the linguistic analogs of drunken action painters, slopping their medium on the page or screen. Interestingly, Winters first cites not poets but writers of prose:

“It is also important to read prose aloud, and to hear the prose when one reads it silently. Melville, Gibbon, or Samuel Johnson about equally will be lost on us if we do not so hear it. Yet the readers are numerous who hear nothing when they read silently and who are helpless in their efforts to read aloud: some of them have defective sensibilities; some have merely never been trained; some have been trained by one or another of our psychological educationalists to read in this fashion in order that they read more rapidly.”

They may also have learned to think of reading and writing as purely utilitarian skills, like frying fish or changing the oil in the car. To read certain things that way – a sheet of instructions from Ikea, for instance – is appropriate. No one savors such prose or expects it to change his life. We ask only for clarity, a quality too often absent even from mundane communications. Winters continues:

“That they can read more rapidly without hearing, I believe there is no doubt, especially if the matter with which they are dealing is trivial. The trouble is that the activity cannot properly be called reading. Such ‘readers’ are barbarians; literature is closed to them, in spite of the fact that they may think otherwise.”