The Intentional Fallacy

The "intentional fallacy” claims that we as readers cannot use the author’s own intention for the work at hand to accurately and sufficiently judge it, but rather the poem's intended meaning should be like a public utterance that doesn’t depend on the one author for its meaning. The poem should stand alone. The authors claim that the meaning of the literary work is not equal to its effects, so however the reader wants to interpret the work is not equal to the work's intrinsic meaning. The authors proclaim that analysis should focus on the text only, and I see a little bit of romanticism in that belief. Wimsatt's and Beardsley's formalist analysis is part of New Criticism, and I think that they would align their thinking with Eliot more than Emerson, but I also see shades of romanticism in their worship of the text as almost sacred. They definitely don't exult the poet, but it seems they place that same degree of exultation on the poem, the glorious poem!

They claim that the critic's task is to examine the linguistic structure and aesthetic unity of the poem, not the poet's intended meaning for what the poem was supposed to be about. Now I agree when they argue on pg. 1383 that the reader could never fully know what Donne's intentions were for a particular poem he wrote, but then I think that part of the allure of analyzing and interacting with poetry is the interpretation part. What was the poet trying to say in this stanza and with this tone? In all my years of taking poetry classes, the teacher has always tossed that question at us, and it became ingrained in me to think that the art of studying poetry was to study and analyze the work at hand so as to make an educated inference about what the poet intended. I never learned about the exalted text which stands alone.

The authors seem to be reducing poetry to science (and, yes, i believe that is reducing! ha!). They want to study its structure, the linguistics of it, and that is a science. They seem to relate it to the study of a building or specific plant, simply desiring to comment on what is already there, right in front of them. I wondered about the substance of interpretation and what they would say about it in class, and I'm still wondering about it now. Wouldn't interpretation to them simply be observation? If they don't believe in self-discovery within the text or research on the biographical and historical info about the author, then how does one interpret a poem? I know the authors write on pg. 1372 that if any historical or biographical information is relevant to the poem itself, it will already be in the poem. This is a tricky thing to say because then it presupposes that every reader's epistemology in acquiring knowledge is relatively the same. We must all be able to understand a poem's intrinsic meaning without outside help if the poem is of any value, right? What if a handful of people don't understand the meaning of a poem? What if readers come up with different meanings? Does that make the poem trash? Well, if a poem's worth is truly measured by these standards, then all poetry is trash. All poetry is unable to be understood. I think it was Plato who said all written poetry is failure. Well, he must be right by Wimsatt's and Beardsley's standards. I think they set themselves up for this. We are all taught to find the poet's intended meaning. Our minds are trained to do this. And is it wrong?