the verbal icon
DESCRIPTION
Wimsatt and Beardsley charge criticism which takes account of authorial intention in a work with commiting a fallacy--the intentional fallacy. The intentional fallacy "is a confusion between the poem and its origins . . . it begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism." While they do not deny the presence of an authorial intention, they deny the importance or usefulness of looking for such an intention as part of analyzing a work. "To insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's performance." Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that the poem must work on its own, independent of any meeting or not meeting of an authorial intention which a reader would have no immediate way of knowing about in the first place. "Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work." The thoughts and feelings expressed in a poem should be imputed to "the dramatic speaker," and not to the author.TRANSCRIPT
