Wimsatt and Beardsley were New Critics: The Extreme Version. In two famous co -authored essays—”The Affective Fallacy” () and “The Intentional Fallacy”. In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author’s intent as it is encoded in Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue in their essay “The Intentional Fallacy” that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor. The Intentional Fallacy, according to Wimsatt, derives from Wimsatt and Beardsley consider this strategy a fallacy partly.
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From Wimssatt Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. University of Kentucky Press, But it seems doubtful if this claim and most of its romantic corollaries are as yet subject to any widespread questioning. The present writers, in a short article entitled “Intention” for a Dictionary 1 of literary criticism, raised the issue but were unable to pursue its implications at any length. We argued that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable intebtional a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art, and it seems to us that this is a principle which goes deep into some differences in the history of critical attitudes.
It is a principle which accepted or rejected points to the polar opposites of classical “imitation” and romantic expression. It entails many specific truths about inspiration, authenticity, biography, literary history and scholarship, and about some trends of contemporary poetry, especially its allusiveness.
There bezrdsley hardly a problem of literary criticism in which the critic’s approach will not be qualified by his view of “intention. Intention has obvious affinities veardsley the author’s attitude toward his work, the way he felt, fwllacy made him write. We begin our discussion with a series of propositions summarized and abstracted to a degree where they seem to us axiomatic.
A poem does not come into existence by accident.
The words of a poem, as Professor Stoll has remarked, come out of a head, not out of a bat. Yet 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. One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the question about intention. How is he to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do.
Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of an artificer. Poetry is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrevelant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and “bugs” from machinery. In this respect poetry differs from practical messages, which are successful if and only if we correctly infer the intention.
They are more abstract than poetry. The meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one, in the sense that a poem expresses a personality or state of soul rather than a physical object like an apple. But even a short lyric poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker no matter how abstractly conceived to a situation no matter how universalized.
We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference.
There is a sense in which an author, by revision, may better achieve his original intention. But it is a very abstract sense. He intended to write a better work, or a better work of a certain kind, and now has done it. But it follows that his fxllacy concrete intention was not his intention.
For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted. The poem is not the critic’s own. Our view is yet different. The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s it is detached from the author at inyentional and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.
The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge. What is said about the poem is subject to the same scrutiny as any statement in beardslsy or in the general science of psychology. A critic of our Dictionary fwllacy, Ananda K. Coomaraswamyhas argued 3 that there are two kinds of inquiry about a work of art: But we maintain that 2 need not be moral criticism: A skillful murder is an example which Coomaraswamy uses, and in his system the difference between the murder and the poem is simply a “moral” one, not an “artistic” one, since each if carried out according to plan is “artistically” successful.
We maintain that 2 is an inquiry of more worth than 1and since 2 and not 1 is capable of distinguishing poetry from murder, the name “artistic criticism” is properly given to 2. It is not so much intentiinal historical statement as a definition to say that the intentional fallacy is a romantic qnd.
Authorial intent
When a rhetorician of the first century A. One may wish to argue whether Longinus should be called romantic, but there can hardly be a doubt that in one important way he is. Goethe’s three questions for “constructive criticism” are “What did the author set out to do?
Was his plan reasonable and sensible, and how far did he succeed in carrying it out? The first italics are Croce’s, the second ours. The upshot of Croce’s system is an ambiguous emphasis on history. I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them. Will you believe me? Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration.
Certainly the poets have had something to say that the critic and professor could not say; their message has been more exciting: But it is necessary that we realize the character and authority of such testimony.
I know two golden rules from ethics, which are no less golden in Composition, than in life. Know thyself; 2dly, Reverence thyself. This is the grand secret for finding readers and retaining them: Horace’s rule, Si vis me flereis applicable in a wider sense than the literal one.
To every poet, to every writer, we might say: Be true, if you would be believed. And further, all beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within.
And Housman’s little handbook to the poetic mind yields this illustration: As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into faplacy mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, bearsdley a whole stanza at once.
This is the logical terminus of the series already quoted. It is probably true that all this is excellent advice for poets. The young imagination fired by Wordsworth and Carlyle is probably closer to the verge of producing a poem than the mind. The art of inspiring poets, or at least of inciting something like poetry in young persons, has probably gone further in our day than ever before.
Books of creative writing such as those issued from the Lincoln School are interesting evidence of what a child can do. Coleridge and Arnold were better critics than most poets have been, and if the critical tendency dried up the poetry in Arnold and perhaps in Coleridge, it is not inconsistent with our argument, which is that judgment of poems is different wimswtt the art of producing them.
Coleridge has given us the classic “anodyne” story, and tells what he can about the genesis of a poem which he calls a “psychological curiosity,” but his definitions of poetry and of the poetic quality “imagination” are to be found elsewhere and in quite other terms. It would be convenient if the passwords of the intentional school, “sincerity,” “fidelity,” “spontaneity, I’ll authenticity,” “genuineness,” “originality,” could be equated with terms such as “integrity,” “relevance,” “unity,” “function,” “maturity,” “subtlety But this is not so.
A Critical Summary of intentional fallacy_百度文库
The artist corrects the objectification when it is not adequate. But this may mean that the earlier attempt was not successful in objectifying the self, or “it may also mean that it was a successful objectification of a self which, when it confronted us clearly, we disowned and repudiated in favor of intentionsl.
Professor Ducasse does not say. Whatever it may be, however, this standard is an element in the definition of art which will not. The evaluation of the work of art remains public; the work is measured against something outside the author. There is criticism of poetry and there is author psychology, which when applied to the present or future takes the form of inspirational intentionao but author psychology can be historical too, and then we have literary biography, a legitimate and attractive study in itself, one approach, as Professor Tillyard would argue, to personality, the poem being only a parallel approach.
Certainly it need not be with a derogatory purpose that one points out personal studies, as distinct from poetic studies, in the realm of literary scholarship. Yet there is danger of confusing personal and poetic studies; and there is the fault of writing the personal as if it were poetic. There is a difference between internal and external evidence for the meaning of a poem. And the paradox is only verbal and superficial that what is 1 internal is also public: There is 3 an intermediate kind of evidence about the character of the author or about private or semiprivate meanings attached to words or topics by an author or by a coterie of which he is a member.
The meaning of words is the history of words, and the biography of an author, his use of a word, and the associations which the word had for him, are part of the words history intsntional meaning. The use of biographical evidence need not involve intentionalismbecause while it may intentionap evidence of what the author intended, it may also be evidence of the meaning of his words and the dramatic character of his utterance.
On the other hand, it may not be all this. And a critic who is concerned with evidence of type 1 and moderately with that of type 3 will in the long run produce a different sort of comment from that of the critic who is concerned with 2 and with 3 where it shades into 2.
The whole glittering parade of Professor Lowes ‘ Road to Xanadufor instance, runs along the border between types 2 and 3 or boldly traverses the romantic region of 2. And it would seem that there is nothing haphazard or fortuitous in their return. If there was nothing “haphazard or fortuitous” in the way the images returned to the surface, that may mean 1 that Coleridge could not produce what he did not have, that he was limited in his creation by what he had read or otherwise experienced, or 2 that having received certain clusters of associations, he was bound to return them in just the way he did, and that the value of the poem may be described in terms of the experiences fallacyy which he had to draw.
The latter pair of propositions a sort of Hartleyan associationism which Coleridge himself repudiated in the Biographia may not be beeardsley to.
There were certainly other combinations, other poems, worse or better, that might have been written by men who had read Bartram and Purchas and Bruce and Milton. And this will be true no matter how many times we are able to add to the brilliant complex of Coleridge’s reading. In certain flourishes such as the sentence we have quoted and in chapter headings like “The Shaping Spirit,” “The Magical Synthesis,” “Imagination.
Creatrix ,” it may be that Professor Lowes pretends to say more about the actual poems than he does. Bartram’s Travels contains a good deal of the history of certain words and of certain romantic Floridian conceptions that appear intentioanl ” Kubla Khan.
Perhaps a person who has read Bartrarn appreciates the poem more than one who has not.