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Wimsatt and Beardsley--The Intentional Fallacy and The Affective Fallacy

Criticism which takes account of authorial intention in a work is 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."

Three evidences for he meaning of a poem:

1) internal--The internal is what is public: "it is discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture."

2) External--The external is "private or idiosyncratic; not part of the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of revelations . . . about how or why the poet wrote the poem."

3) Intermediate--"private or semiprivate meanings attached to words or topics by an author."

The affective fallacy "is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does). It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism."

"The outcome of either fallacy . . . is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear."
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