In a diagnostic test I recently took during my literary criticism course, I was asked to define authorship. My response?

"An author is one who constructs a thought or an idea and shares their idea with others by crafting words that explain the thought processes. These words are gathered into novels, articles, short stories, poems, and other forms of literature. It is the author’s purpose to convey an idea as clearly and sometimes as creatively as possible, bringing understanding to a topic that a reader might not have grasped previously."

After reading Emerson's essay, "The Poet," I found that my definition had a few similarities to Emerson's definition of an author:

"The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For the experience of the age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet" (726).

The author is responsible for bringing new understanding to a unique experience. Especially since "the man is only half himself, the other half is his expression" (Emerson, 725). Emerson's words ring true for me. As an English major, I cannot begin to count the painstaking hours I spent trying to siphon out just the right word to accurately portray a personal experience. Emerson argues that many men try to pinpoint the poetic language of Nature, but only those with the most adept and skillful ears can interpret Nature's song (Emerson, 726). Yet even then, when the poet/author finally expresses an idea in the purest humanly form, the expression is still imperfect. I believe that this imperfection is the beauty of authorship--sometimes our language does not contain the best word possible for expression.

The struggle for purest expression flows out of authorship and into reading. Where the author has failed to express correctly "nature's song," the responsibility to find the best form of expression falls on the reader. Perhaps the reader will have a broader experience of the author's idea, and perhaps a broader vocabulary useful in explanation. Where does the line between author and reader fall? Is there ever a point where authors stop reading and possess only original thought, or are they always under some sort of influence of other authors (which would make them a reader)? Are readers ever only just readers, or do they take on author-like characteristics?

All quotations taken from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2001.