The Affective Fallacy

In Wimsatt and Beardsley's "intentional fallacy" the intentional is the confusion of the poem with its origins while in the "affective fallacy," the affective is the confusion of the poem and its results. The authors occupy themselves with what is to happen once a poem is read. What are we to do with a poem?

On pg. 1388, they talk about separating the emotive from "referential meaning" in the poem. They seem to look unfavorably toward an emotive response to a poem because, I think, they believe an emotion may not be tied to the meaning of the poem. An emotion can be wrong for a poem. A reader could be bringing his or her own emotions to a poem that doesn't intend to evoke those emotions. They quote I.A. Richardson from his work Practical Criticism when he said that we project our emotions and feelings at objects innocent of feelings. They further quote him in his work from Science and Poetry when he claims that science is a statement and poetry is the "psuedo-statement" that plays an important role in making us feel better about things than statements would. It seems to me that the authors are taking quotes from men who critique our society's response to poetry as subjective and psychologically remedial to back up their own arguments. I don't think you can lump all of society together into one way to interact with poetry. We don't all use it to alleviate the woes of our lives. Poetry isn't this pathetic, self-serving remedy for us all. Some do appreciate poetry for what it is. Some do clearly see the anguish or rage in poetry where we cannot put our own emotions. Poetry does speak to us. I don't believe we always speak to it, and that's what I feel like the authors were criticizing, then again, it was difficult to follow their logic at times.

They stated that they believe analysis of poetry to be a linguistic study, and that's exactly what they did on pgs. 1389-93. They meticulously wrote about how words intrinsically have meaning but they can suggest another, often this being a social or cultural product. They talked at length about emotive import and how it depends on descriptive meaning and also descriptive suggestion at times. They argued that what a word does to a person isn't necessarily what the word means, and all this time I'm reading this detailed, labored-over linguistic study of the affective quality of poetry, I'm thinking, "Does this matter?" I understood all their arguments and I agreed with them, for the most part, but I agreed with them in and of themselves. I thought to myself, "Yeah, so? Why do we need to apply this to poetic rules? Why so many rules?" What does it matter that the words used in poetry really signify their true meaning instead of just existing for a certain emotive response from the reader? Maybe a poet doesn't want his words to convey their true meanings. That's the beauty of poetry to me. Poetry is a play on words, a game, a manipulation of words with hidden meaning and emotion behind it all. What's all this talk about the Truth? All poetry must point back to the Truth!

Wimsatt and Beardsley seem to make all these assertions of how poetry must be treated-- all the other authors we've studied do the same thing-- and they assert that we all must get back to the Truth, but then they never give concrete evidence of what that is. That is why theory and philosophy frustrate me so. Where's the evidence? Wimsatt and Beardsley claim that people testify to what poetry does to others and what it does to themselves, so the question arises of the sincerity of the critic as well as the poet. They talk of sincerity like they talk of the Truth, but then they don't tell us how to measure these things. How are we to know if the critic is sincere or the poet for that matter? To what standard do we measure them against? Emerson never did find the Poet who would bring us the Truth. I don't think we ever will.

The authors write about the affective state on pg. 1397 and they say there is not much room for synaesthesis or for "the touchy little attitudes of which it is composed." I think this whole reading was just the touchy little attitudes of Wimsatt and Beardsley, but then again, I'm just bringing my false emotive response to the piece.