Wimsatt and Beardsley
"The Intentional Fallacy"
in
Margolis,
Philosophy Looks at the Arts
(Third ed., 1987)
[SK's comments]
[some italics omitted]
[final revision: 2 Oct 2026]
Late in the process, after encountering an outrageous typo, I discovered that someone or other has made numerous silent excisions as compared with the 1946 original. The source Margolis gives here is:
W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), Chapter I.
These annotations are arduous, and I decided it was too late to change course.
Mea culpa, and quod bene vertat.
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19.
The Intentional Fallacy
W. K. WIMSATT, JR. AND
MONROE C. BEARDSLEY
[...] [epigraph] [...]
I
The claim of the author's "intention" upon the critic's judgment has been challenged in a number of recent discussions,
notably in the debate entitled The Personal Heresy, between Professors Lewis and Tillyard
.
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 Dictionary1 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
as 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 is hardly a problem of a
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literary criticism in which the critic's approach will not be qualified by his view of "intention."
"Intention," as we shall use the term, corresponds to what he intended in a formula which more or less explicitly has had wide acceptance.
"In order to judge the poet's performance,
we must know
what he intended."
Intention is
design or plan in the author's mind.
Intention has obvious affinities for the author's attitude toward his work, the way he felt, what made him write.
We begin our discussion with a series of propositions
summarized and abstracted to a degree where they seem to us axiomatic.
1. 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 hat.
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.
2. 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.
And
if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence,
and the critic must go outside the poem—for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem.
"Only one caveat must be borne in mind," says an eminent intentionalist in a moment when his theory repudiates itself;
"the poet's aim must be judged at the moment of the creative act, that is to say, by the art of the poem itself."
Indeed this cannot really be
how
one
expects to get an answer
.
Musicians often think we
can
tell, at once,
both
what someone
tried
to do,
and
that they failed to do it.
This much is often
available
,
but indeed, not "internally".
That is: The heard result and the inferred intent do arrive together, holistically, awaiting only the armchair "critic" to deliver the unfortunate verdict. But an 'ecological' account of this transaction can't explain anything if it has recourse only to lizard-brain inheritances. Rather, some rarefied piece of propositional knowledge has to be motivating the inference. This knowledge has not come from 'inside' the present moment, it has come from outside of it; perhaps from one's entire accumulation of prior experience, or perhaps from a small but salient corpus of cultivated learning; but from outside all the same.
(Incidentally, we have here, also, the paradigm case of musical 'understanding' standing in the way of musical 'appreciation'. If you can't know everything, better to know nothing.)
Now, I have no idea how to approach this question in
literary art
.
If someone insisted that only the details differ while the bottom line remains the same, I would be dubious.
The false concreteness of language seems to seduce us into the same inference, e.g., that a writer making a certain weighty
allusi
on
has at once tried and failed to bring off the gesture, like a trumpet player going for the high C and landing on the septimal B-flat instead. We don't have to litigate the most notorious problems with that analogy right this second. An obvious commonality even here is that the 'critic's' verdict of failed intention is a cognitive artifact rather than an ecological one; it is atomistic rather than holistic. Its arrival in one package is but a distant memory if you can't fit the two pieces back in the box after they've been taken out. I don't know how eco-pragmatists "expect" to get around that.
3. 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.
"A poem should not mean but be."
A poem can be only through its meaning—since its medium is words—
yet it is, simply is, in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant.
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 irrelevant
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.
Hmm.
Literally my first thought here (above) was that loud failures do seem to be profligate drivers of
intentional
ist
infer
ence
.
My second thought was to poke at the one contemporary doctrine I'm familiar with which does try to allow for an intent to be, somehow, communicated without having been fulfilled; for "evidence" of the intent to be "internally" present without the intent having been realized.
The
exclu
sion
thesis is itself intentionalistic and atomistic, so I'm not sure what's going on there. The point seems to be that writing a poem is not an illocutionary act; or perhaps not for purposes of criticism.
4. 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.
How can the
situation
of a
dramatic speaker
be "internal" to a work?
One way: we can permit the "situation" to be
universalized
and the "dramatic speaker" to be
abstractly conceived
both by degree, and from there it seems obvious that "public knowledge" rushes in to fill any conceptual vacuums thus created; indeed, just to the degree that they are created, no more nor less.
the paradox is only verbal and superficial that what is (1) internal is also public: ... ; while what is (2) external is private or idiosyncratic;
(373)
It's a neat trick.
The intercession of a "dramatic speaker" per se does, however, seem like quite the unparsimonious gambit. There may be no "inference" needed
to impute
the whole shebang directly to
the author
if that author just is present to the reader ('present' in any of a number of ways).
This is why
ought
s
won't suffice here. (There are other reasons, but this is the immediate one.) The author must somehow be effaced, and the "dramatic speaker" present-ed, all without anyone telling anyone else what to do.
To this end, "internal" measures are necessary but not sufficient. The rest of the world has to cooperate, or else the trick doesn't work. The rest of the world has to cooperate, and yet somehow also be 'effaced' in the decisive moments; otherwise the whole of it comes rushing into the void.
This is possible but elusive. Better to say, really, that it is delicate and exceptional . . . just like all Liberal social achievements. As with poverty and crime, the question is not why the delicate achievement unravels but rather how it was ever raveled in the first place.
(Next up: Was the garment worth the ravel?)
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5.
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 former concrete intention
was not his intention.
"He's the man we were in search of,
that's true,"
says Hardy's rustic constable,"
and yet
he's not the man we were in search of.
For
the man we were in search of
was not the man we wanted."
"Is not a critic,"
asks Professor Stoll,
"a judge,
who does not explore his own consciousness,
but determines the author's meaning or intention,
as if the poem were
a will,
a contract,
or the constitution?
The poem is not the critic's own."
He has accurately diagnosed
two forms of irresponsibility,
one of which he prefers.
Our view is yet different.
The poem is not the critic's own but the author's
In both 1946 and 1954, this reads:
. . . not the critic's own and not the author's . . .
Sheesh!
(it is detached from the author at birth 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 linguistics or in the general science of psychology.
The moneyshot.
Unfortunately, it doesn't obviously follow from the fact of
public
possession
that public
scrutiny
ought to apply. It may be, actually, that "scrutiny" is itself the first step towards privatizing our "public possessions". Some further hints in that direction are on the way.
The "public scrutiny" thesis seems to require one (or both) of two prior notions:
(1) a particular (expansive) notion of what the "public" order ought to be, i.e., a notion whereby, so to speak, even the poems get the full treatment;
(2) a particular (narrow) notion of poetry, whereby it just is a "public" matter of the kind to which certain formal procedures necessarily apply.
I put 'narrow' and 'expansive' in scare-parentheses to indicate that we've never actually had a public order that went quite this far, and that most of us (I presume) wouldn't actually want to live under one that did.
A critic of our Dictionary article, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, has argued3 that there are two kinds of inquiry about a work of art:
(1) whether the artist achieved his intentions;
(2) whether the work of art "ought ever to have been undertaken at all" and so "whether it is worth preserving."
Number (2), Coomaraswamy maintains, is not "criticism of any work of art qua work of art," but is rather moral criticism;
number (1) is artistic criticism.
But
we maintain that (2)
need not be moral criticism:
How is this possible?
The only way I can see is:
The
worth
of the
work
has to entirely cease to redound to the
moral
credit or discredit of the person responsible for creating it.
i.e. We can't just command this latest
ought
to stand pat; it must actually fail to find its proper object. Or perhaps, speaking intentionalistically: it must be prevented from finding its object, because otherwise, it will. The mere thought that a work may never have existed, or may cease to exist, cannot arise at all, because this already points to its cause, and its cause just is the person who made it. Hence the fact of the work must somehow become 'brute'.
What we have here, then, in the Liberal pas de deux of nonintervention and constraint, is a curtain call for constraint. And this, to be both viable and effective, cannot be done heavy-handedly. Rather, it has to emerge as an informal norm, 'downstream' of some prior formal structures.
Of course the parties to such a dispute are bound to go straight for their favored results and to skip over the requisite 'upstream' machinations. But if the question is this hotly debated, we're safe in assuming that the requisite structures did not yet exist, in spite of what anyone thinks "ought" to happen.
(It remains to be seen whether this untethering of citizen from public action entails the wholesale decentering of 'the person behind the artwork', or if it is more of a targeted excision of just one aspect of public personhood from just one parochial academic concern. Either way, this can be workable only where the work itself, bad as it can get, doesn't do the kind of harm that forces "moral" reckoning in another domain. Letting artists off the hook, preemptively, for 'real' harm done by their works seems like an exceptionally bad "public" idea. But then, we no longer even agree on what constitutes harm. If we could, then genuinely harmful artworks simply get referred to the existing public redress procedures, while harm-less works simply are not thus referred and are hence cleared for takeoff into the wild blue yonder of the uncaused. I suppose this is one thing it might mean for the question of a work's worth to cease to be a moral question: like, it's not a serious moral question; it's a piddling one, so small that you can't see it with the naked eye. That's very Pragmatist. But then, how many small problems can you have before they turn into one big one?)
that there is another way of deciding whether works of art are worth preserving and whether, in a sense, they "ought" to have been undertaken, and
this is the way of objective criticism of works of art as such, the way which enables us to distinguish between
a skillful murder
and
a skillful poem.
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 (1),
and
since (2) and not (1) is capable of
distinguishing poetry from murder,
the name "artistic criticism" is properly given to (2).
If this is right, then AC was there long before the Cultural Studies people, before the Performance Art people, and before Stockhausen's infamous 9/11 remark. Impressive, in a way!
Or, alternatively . . . all art has always been Performance Art; it is only (merely)
moral
s
which have shifted/drifted, and along with them, the methods for and the importance of
distinguishing poetry from murder
.
In theory, it must be possible for Stockhausen's remark to ensue from the noblest disinterest, and thus to steer utterly clear of (intentionally!) condoning the acts to which it refers; and yet, I have to think that it is a remark which simply was not imaginable under so many bygone "moral" regimes. i.e. The remark fully implicates the collective even if the person saying it can be fully absolved. Isn't that the real scandal?
Here is another intrusive thought from a millennial who has been typically and chronically late to the party:
It can't be denied that pre-20th c. high art generally was far more 'conceptual' than 'experimental' in Galenson's sense of those terms. Under 'classical-conceptual' conventions, there is much more justice in AC's blanket equation of
skill
with fulfilment of intent, simply because the 'conceptual' process essentially folds in a declaration of intent, in the form of preparatory work.
Not everyone can work this way. And, not to say that "skill" per se simply must be the reason; but if not, then what is the word "skill" supposed to mean? Mere 'fulfilment of a declared intent' can be, at most, one of its uses. Is this one of its uses? How could it not be?
Galenson purports to show strong bimodality between these two types of artists. He won't get any argument from me, because I myself am completely incapable of working from an outline, really even of making an outline or a sketch in the first place. We'll never know if I could have learned the 'conceptual' way just fine had I encountered an institutional environment and culture better oriented to it. As it is, however, seeing that I am completely incapable of planning my works in any way at all, the ability to work from a plan does, if I'm being honest, always feel to me like the far more demanding way, the way far more deserving of the ascription of "skill" or "technique".
Something tells me that this 'classical-conceptual' view of technique is what is really at issue for someone of the sensibilities that AC's rejoinder exemplifies: without intent as a measure, the entire conception loses its motivating criterion. So, oddly enough, though WB's own sensibilities hardly suggest affinity with (either kind of) 'experimental' art, they do insist that criticism be a
public art
that centers the public art-object; and this would seem to be not just accommodating of (both kinds of) 'experimental' art but actually necessary to any criticism of it. AC's way can win "public" sanction only where its 'motivating criterion' of 'declared intent' does not simply libel the artist by ascribing to them an intent that was never declared. (And then, obvs, the way around this is: to turn Ecological, so that the 'declaration' simply becomes part of the surface content of the public object itself. That is: to devise an effective libel that cannot be formally proven in court. Here is a 'mob tactic', again in two distinct but mutually overdetermined senses.)
II
It is not so much
a historical statement
as
a definition
to say that
the intentional fallacy is
a romantic one.
I've never quite been able to follow this part. The above, re: the 'classical-conceptual' imperative, is just the latest manifestation of this.
When a rhetorician of the first century
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A.D. writes:
"Sublimity is the echo of a great soul,"
or when he tells us that
"Homer enters into the sublime actions of his heroes" and "shares the full inspiration of the combat,"
we shall not be surprised to find this rhetorician considered as a distant harbinger of romanticism and greeted in the warmest terms by Saintsbury.
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 do do?
Was his plan reasonable and sensible,
and
how far did he succeed in carrying it out?"
If one leaves out the middle question,
one has
in effect
the system of Croce
—the culmination and crowning philosophic expression of romanticism.
The beautiful is the successful intuition-expression, and the ugly is the unsuccessful;
the intuition or private part of art is the aesthetic fact,
and
the medium or public part is not the subject of aesthetic at all.
The Madonna of Cimabue is still in the Church of Santa Maria Novella;
but does she speak to the visitor of to-day as to the Florentines of the thirteenth century?
Historical interpretation
labors . . . to reintegrate in us the psychological conditions which have changed in the course of history.
It . . . enables us to see a work of art
(a physical object)
as its
author saw
it in the moment of production.4
The first italics are Croce's,
the second ours.
The upshot of Croce's system is an ambiguous emphasis on history.
With such passages as a point of departure a critic may write a nice analysis of the meaning or "spirit" of a play by Shakespeare or Corneille
—a process that involves close historical study but remains aesthetic criticism—
or he may, with equal plausibility, produce an essay in sociology, biography, or other kinds of nonaesthetic history.
Well, if the
author saw it
as "author", then that is a
psychological condition
that can actually be
reintegrate
d
by way of apprenticeship in close
reproduc
tion
of the object itself.
But if we expect to coax this kind of thing out of
history
or
sociology
we will be
labor
ing
fruitlessly for a long time.
III
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? . . . there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves.
Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry,
but by a sort of genius and inspiration.
That reiterated mistrust of the poets which we hear from Socrates may have been part of a rigorously ascetic view in which we hardly wish to
[371]
participate,
yet Plato's Socrates saw a truth about the poetic mind which the world no longer commonly sees—
so much criticism, and that the most inspirational and most affectionately remembered, has proceeded from the poets themselves.
Certainly the poets have had something to say that the critic and professor could not say;
their message has been more exciting:
that poetry should come as naturally as leaves to a tree,
that poetry is the lava of the imagination,
or that it is emotion recollected in tranquility.
But it is necessary that we realize the character and authority of such testimony.
There is only a fine shade of difference between such expressions and a kind of earnest advice that authors often give.
Thus Edward Young, Carlyle, Walter Pater:
I know two golden rules from ethics,
which are no less golden in Composition,
than in life.
1. Know thyself;
2dly, Reverence thyself.
This is the grand secret for finding readers and retaining them: let him who would move and convince others, be first moved and convinced himself. Horace's rule, Si vis me flere, is 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.
Truth!
there can be no merit,
no craft at all,
without that.
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:
Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon—beer is a sedative to the brain,
and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion of my life—I would go out for a walk of two or three hours.
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 my mind,
with sudden
and
unaccountable emotion,
sometimes a line or two of verse,
sometimes a whole stanza at once.
This is the logical terminus of the series already quoted.
Here is a confession of how poems were written which would do as a definition of poetry just as well as "emotion recollected in tranquility"—and which the young poet might equally well take to heart as a practical rule.
Drink a pint of beer, relax, go walking, think on nothing in particular, look at things, surrender yourself to yourself, search for the truth in your own
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soul, listen to the sound of your own inside voice, discover and express the vraie vérité.
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 of the student who has been sobered by Aristotle or Richards.
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.5 All this, however, would appear to belong to an art separate from criticism—to
a psychological discipline,
a system of self-development,
a yoga,
which the young poet perhaps does well to notice, but which is something different from
the public art
of evaluating poems.
N.B. A certain elimination of "cause" is evident here too.
Who or what does the
inciting
here?
In goes the
pint
out comes the
poem
?
Yes, but then, why? . . .
. . . and again, why? . . .
An
unaccountable
mystery.
In the case of
"Be true, if you would be believed"
this is particularly transparent:
'be the cause . . .'
not proximately but
ultimately;
if not
of the poem itself,
then
of its effects on
"readers".
As a profligate practitioner of the beer-and-walk method, I can attest both to its effectiveness and to how the "sedative" effect begets, sometimes, an "unaccountable flow". But proximate causes are not far to seek here.
Perhaps the phenomenology of flow just does entail the subjective recession of cause, whether for creator or consumer, beer or no beer; so, when people make these breathless statements about things that 'just kinda happen', we can take these seriously as reports of subjective experience, but not as good "public" accounting.
If having a few drinks really does cause your entire determined-and-determining self-"history" to evaporate, you probably should stop drinking; but then, this is quite unlikely to be what's really going on. Most of our beer-anecdotes have it that what comes out this way is actually more honest, or at least less 'inhibited'.
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 from
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,"
"authenticity,"
"genuineness,"
"originality,"
could be equated with terms such as
"integrity,"
"relevance,"
"unity,"
"function,"
"maturity,"
"subtlety,"
"adequacy,"
and
other more precise terms of evaluation
—in short, if
"expression"
always meant
aesthetic achievement.
But this is not so.
"Aesthetic" art,
says Professor Curt Ducasse,
an ingenious theorist of expression,
is
the conscious objectification of feelings,
in which an intrinsic part is
the critical moment.
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 another."6
What is the standard by which
we disown or accept the self?
Professor Ducasse does not say.
Whatever it may be, however, this standard is
an element
in the definition of art
which will not reduce to
terms of objectivication.
The evaluation of the work of art remains public;
the work is measured against
something outside the author.
Well, the so-called
public knowledge
of which
the human being
is
an object
is not exactly
either
outside
or
inside
of us.
In a manner of speaking, we have 'internalized' it by the time we are writing or reading poetry in its register.
Understood this way, it is bigger than any single "human being". It lives "outside", where there is much more of it than can fit 'inside'. But if some of it, at least, doesn't wedge its way in there, then it is neither "public" nor "knowledge" nor "human".
For certain writers, confronting one's own internalizations as
something
entirely
outside
oneself
is a very bad thing; literally the worst, actually.
As this cohort is infamous for their determinist reductionism, so the Marxist theory of alienation depends upon full 'determination' of the confrontation by the circumstances. Failing that, responsibilty for the confrontation falls on the principals: either we 'give our permission' to be confronted or we don't.
In art, I presume that there is such an alienating determination as regards, say, social status, but not as regards experience. Here I might even dare to differentiate the 'fact' of status from the 'experience' of it. Anyway, there is something inscrutable about the determination of 'experience'. We can never quite reach the terminus of the causal chain, perhaps because its ends are invisibly clasped together. So, what we desperately need, one way or another, in order to be enhanced by experience rather than crushed by it, is something solid and (to us) unchanging. Here it matters not at all who (if anyone) has made the solid thing, so long as it is solid.
Dilman says:
"When I judge this to be similar to that in such-and-such a respect, my judgement is objective if it is responsible to criteria that are independent of my thoughts.
This notion of "criteria" seems better to get at what WB want here: criteria can more accurately be said to be "outside" of us than can the "public knowledge" which is part of us and of which we are a part. But criteria are synthetic and have to be stipulated; and, to be "public", these stipulations have to obtain sanction of one kind or another. AND, it can fairly be doubted whether there has been nearly as much of this sanction handed out over the years as our great Liberal Institutionalists seem to think.
IV
There is criticism of poetry
and
there is author psychology,
which
when applied to the present or future
takes the form of inspirational promotion;
promotion
(n.) :
author psychology
applied to the present or future
[373]
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:
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;
while what is
(2)
external is private or idiosyncratic;
not a part of the work as a linguistic fact:
it consists of revelations (in journals, for example, or letters or reported conversations) about how or why the poet wrote the poem—to what lady, while sitting on what lawn, or at the death of what friend or brother.
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 the 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 word's history and meaning.7
But the three types of evidence, especially (2) and (3), shade into one another so subtly that it is not always easy to draw a line between examples, and hence arises the difficulty for criticism.
The use of biographical evidence
need not involve intentionalism,
because while it may be 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's Road to Xanadu, for instance, runs along the border between types (2) and (3) or boldly traverses the romantic region of (2).
"Kubla Khan,"
says Professor Lowes,
"is the fabric of a vision, but every image that rose up in its weaving had passed that way before. And it would seem that there is nothing haphazard or fortuitous in their return."
This is not quite clear—not even when Professor Lowes explains that there were clusters of associations, like hooked atoms, which were drawn into complex relation with other clusters in the deep well of Coleridge's memory, and which then
[374]
coalesced and issued forth as poems.
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 on 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 assented 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.
There is a certain deceptive variation in these fancy chapter titles; one expects to pass on to a new stage in the argument, and one finds—more and more sources, more and more about "the streamy nature of association."
"Wohin der Weg?"
quotes Professor Lowes
for the motto of his book.
"Kein Weg!
Ins Unbretretene."
Claude gives:
"Where does the path lead?"
"No path! Into the untrodden."
Precisely because
the way is
unbetreten,
we should say,
it leads away from the poem.
Bartram's Travels contains a good deal of the history of certain words and of certain romantic Floridian conceptions that appear in "Kubla Khan."
And a good deal of that history has passed and was then passing into the very stuff of our language.
Perhaps a person who has read Bartram appreciates the poem more than one who has not.
Or, by looking up the vocabulary of "Kubla Khan" in the Oxford English Dictionary, or by reading some of the other books there quoted, a person may know the poem better.
But
it would seem to pertain little
to the poem
to know
that Coleridge had read Bartram.
There is a gross body of life,
of sensory and mental experience,
which lies behind and in some sense causes every poem,
but can never be and need not be known in the verbal and hence intellectual composition which is the poem.
For all the objects of our manifold experience,
for every unity,
there is an action of the mind
which
cuts off roots,
melts away context—
or indeed
we should never have objects or ideas or anything to talk about.
It is probable that there is nothing in Professor Lowes's vast book which could detract from anyone's appreciation of either The Ancient Mariner or "Kubla Khan."
We next present a case where preoccupation with evidence of type (3) has gone so far as to distort a critic's view of a poem (yet a case not so obvious as those that abound in our critical journals).
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In a well-known poem by John Donne
appears this quatrain:
Moving of th'earth brings harmes
and
feares,
Men reckon what it did
and
meant,
But trepidation of the spheares,
Though greater farre,
is innocent.
A recent critic in an elaborate treatment of Donne's learning has written of this quatrain as follows:
He touches the emotional pulse of the situation by a skillful allusion to the new
and
the old astronomy. . . .
Of the new astronomy,
the "moving of the earth" is the most radical principle;
of the old,
the "trepidation of the spheares" is the motion of the greatest complexity. . . .
The poet must exhort his love to quietness
and
calm upon his departure;
and
for this purpose the figure based upon the latter motion
(trepidation),
long absorbed into the traditional astronomy,
fittingly suggests the tension of the moment without arousing the "harmes
and
feares" implicit in the figure of the moving earth.9
The argument is plausible and rests on a well substantiated thesis that Donne was deeply interested in the new astronomy and its repercussions in the theological realm.
In various works Donne shows his familiarity [...]
[...]
In The First Anniversary he says the "new philosophy calls all in doubt."
In the Elegy on Prince Henry he says that the "least moving of the center" makes "the world to shake."
It is difficult to answer
argument like this,
and
impossible to answer
it
with
evidence of like nature.
There is no reason why Donne might not have written a stanza in which the two kinds of celestial motion stood for two sorts of emotion at parting.
And if
we become full of
astronomical ideas
and
see Donne only
against the background
of the new science,
we may believe that he did.
But the text itself remains to be dealt with, the analyzable vehicle of a complicated metaphor.
And one may observe:
(1) that the movement of the earth according to the Copernician theory is a celestial motion, smooth and regular, and while it might cause religious or philosophic fears, it could not be associated with the crudity and earthiness of the kind of commotion which the speaker in the poem wishes to discourage;
(2) that there is another moving of the earth, an earthquake, which has just these qualities and is to be associated with the tear-floods
[376]
and sigh-tempests of the second stanza of the poem;
(3) that "trepidation" is an appropriate opposite of earthquake, because each is a shaking or vibratory motion; and "trepidation of the spheares" is "greater farre" than an earthquake, but not much greater (if two such motions can be compared as to greatness) than the annual motion of the earth;
(4) that reckoning what it "did and meant" shows that the event has passed, like an earthquake, not like the incessant celestial movement of the earth.
Perhaps a knowledge of Donne's interest in the new science may add another shade of meaning, an overtone to the stanza in question, though to say even this runs against the words.
To make the geocentric and heliocentric antithesis the core of the metaphor is to disregard the English language, to prefer private evidence to public, external to internal.
V
If the distinction between kinds of evidence has implications for the historical critic, it has them no less for the contemporary poet and his critic.
Or,
since every rule for a poet is but another side of a judgment by a critic,
and
since the past is the realm of the scholar
and
critic,
and
the future
and
present that of the poet
and
the critical leaders of taste,
we may say that
the problems arising in literary scholarship
from the intentional fallacy
are matched by
others which arise in the world of progressive experiment.
The question of "allusiveness,"
for example,
as acutely posed by the poetry of Eliot,
is certainly one where a false judgment is likely to involve the intentional fallacy.
The frequency and depth of literary allusion in the poetry of Eliot and others has driven so many in pursuit of full meanings to the Golden Bough and the Elizabethan drama that it has become a kind of commonplace to suppose that we do not know what a poet means unless we have traced him in his reading—a supposition redolent with intentional implications.
The stand taken by F. O. Matthiessen is a sound one and partially forestalls the difficulty.
If
one reads these lines with an attentive ear
and
is sensitive to their sudden shifts in movement,
the contrast between the actual Thames
and
the idealized vision of it during an age before it flowed through a megalopolis is sharply conveyed by that movement itself,
whether
or not one recognizes the refrain to be from Spenser.
Eliot's allusions work
when we know them
—
and to a great extent
when we do not know them
—
through their suggestive power.
But
sometimes we find allusions supported by notes,
and
it is a nice
[377]
question whether the notes function more as guides to send us where we may be educated, or more as indications in themselves about the character of the allusions.
"Nearly everything of importance . . . that is apposite to an appreciation of 'The Waste Land,'" writes Matthiessen of Miss Weston's book, "has been incorporated into the structure of the poem itself, or into Eliot's Notes."
And
with such an admission
it may begin to appear that
it would not much matter if Eliot invented his sources
(as Sir Walter Scott invented chapter epigraphs from "old plays" and "anonymous" authors, or as Coleridge wrote marginal glosses for The Ancient Mariner).
Allusions to Dante, Webster, Marvell, or Baudelaire doubtless gain something because these writers existed, but it is doubtful whether the same can be said for an allusion to an obscure Elizabethan:
The sound of horns
and
motors,
which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
"Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees": says Eliot,
When of a sudden,
listening,
you shall hear,
A noise of horns
and
hunting,
which shall bring
Actaeon to Diana in the spring,
Where all shall see her naked skin.
The irony is completed by the quotation itself;
had Eliot, as is quite conceivable, composed these lines to furnish his own background, there would be no loss of validity.
The conviction may grow as one reads Eliot's next note:
"I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia."
The important word in this note—on Mrs. Porter and her daughter who washed their feet in soda water—is "ballad."
And if one should feel from the lines themselves their "ballad" quality, there would be little need for the note.
Ultimately, the inquiry must focus on the integrity of such notes as parts of the poem, for where they constitute special information about the meaning of phrases in the poem, they ought to be subject to the same scrutiny as any of the other words in which it is written.
Matthiessen believes the notes were
the price Eliot
"had to pay
in order to avoid
what he would have considered
muffling the energy
of his poem
by extended connecting links
in the text itself."
But it may be questioned whether
the notes
and
the need for them
are not
equally muffling.
F. W. Bateson has plausibly argued that Tennyson's "The Sailor Boy" would be better if half the stanzas were omitted, and the best versions of ballads like "Sir Patrick Spens" owe their power to the very audacity with which the minstrel has taken for granted the story
[378]
upon which he comments.
What
then
if a poet finds
he cannot take so much for granted
in
a more recondite context
and
rather than
write informatively,
supplies notes?
It can be said in favor of this plan that at least the notes do not pretend to be dramatic, as they would if written in verse.
On the other hand, the notes may look like unassimilated material lying loose beside the poem,
necessary
for the meaning of the verbal symbol,
but not integrated,
so that the symbol stands incomplete.
We mean to suggest
by the above analysis
that
whereas notes tend to seem to
justify themselves
as external indexes to the author's
intention,
yet
they ought to be
judged like any other parts
of a composition
(verbal arrangement
special to a particular context),
and
when so judged
their reality as parts of the poem,
or their imaginative integration with the rest of the poem,
may come into question.
Matthiessen, for instance, sees that Eliot's titles for poems and his epigraphs are informative apparatus, like the notes.
But while he is worried by some of the notes and thinks that Eliot "appears to be mocking himself for writing the note at the same time that he wants to convey something by it," Matthiessen believes that the "device" of epigraphs "is not at all open to the objection of not being sufficiently structural."
"The intention," he says, "is to enable the poet to secure a condensed expression in the poem itself."
"In each case the epigraph is designed to form an integral part of the effect of the poem." And Eliot himself, in his notes, has justified his poetic practice in terms of intention.
The Hanged Man,
a member of the traditional pack,
fits my purpose in two ways:
because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer,
and
because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. . . .
The man with Three Staves
(an authentic member of the Tarot pack)
I associate,
quite arbitrarily,
with the Fisher King himself.
And perhaps
he is to be taken more seriously here,
when off guard
in a note,
than when
in his Norton Lectures
he comments on the difficulty of saying what a poem means and adds playfully that he thinks of prefixing to a second edition of Ash Wednesday some lines from Don Juan:
I don't pretend that I quite understand
My own meaning when I would be
very
fine;
But the fact is that I have nothing planned
Unless it were to be a moment merry.
If Eliot and other contemporary poets have any characteristic fault, it may be in planning too much.
[379]
Allusiveness in poetry is one of several critical issues by which we have illustrated the more abstract issue of intentionalism,
but it may be for today the most important illustration.
As a poetic practice allusiveness would appear to be in some recent poems an extreme corollary of the romantic intentionalist assumption, and as a critical issue it challenges and brings to light in a special way the basic premise of intentionalism.
The following instance from the poetry of Eliot may serve to epitomize the practical implications of what we have been saying.
In Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," toward the end, occurs the line: "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each," and this bears a certain resemblance to a line in a Song by John Donne, "Teach me to heare Mermaides singing," so that for the reader acquainted to a certain degree with Donne's poetry, the critical question arises:
Is Eliot's line an allusion to Donne's?
Is Prufrock thinking about Donne?
Is Eliot thinking about Donne?
We suggest that there are two radically different ways of looking for an answer to this question.
There is
(1) the way of poetic analysis and exegesis, which inquires whether it makes any sense if Eliot-Prufrock is thinking about Donne.
In an earlier part of the poem, when Prufrock asks, "Would it have been worth while, . . . To have squeezed the universe into a ball," his words take half their sadness and irony from certain energetic and passionate lines of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress."
But the exegetical inquirer may wonder whether mermaids considered as "strange sights" (to hear them is in Donne's poem analogous to getting with child a mandrake root) have much to do with Prufrock's mermaids, which seem to be symbols of romance and dynamism, and which incidentally have literary authentication, if they need it, in a line of a sonnet by Gérard de Nerval.
This method of inquiry may lead to the conclusion that the given resemblance between Eliot
and
Donne is without significance
and
is better not thought of,
or
the method may have the disadvantage of providing no certain conclusion.
Nevertheless, we submit that this is the true and objective way of criticism, as contrasted to what the very uncertainty of exegesis might tempt a second kind of critic to undertake:
(2) the way of biographical or genetic inquiry, in which, taking advantage of the fact that Eliot is still alive, and in the spirit of a man who would settle a bet, the critic writes to Eliot and asks him what he meant, or if he had Donne in mind.
We shall not here weigh the probabilities—whether Eliot would answer that he meant nothing at all, had nothing at all in mind—a sufficiently good answer to such a question—or in an unguarded moment might furnish a clear and, within its limit, irrefutable answer.
Our point is that such an answer to such an inquiry would have nothing to do with the poem "Prufrock"; it would not be a critical inquiry.
Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way.
Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle.
[380]
Notes
1.
Dictionary of World Literature,
Joseph T. Shipley,
ed.
(New York, 1942),
326-329.
[...]
3. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "Intention," in American Bookman I (1944), 41-48.
[...]
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