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The Intentional Fallacy
Author(s): W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and M. C. Beardsley
Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1946), pp. 468-488
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27537676
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THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
By W. K. WIMSATT, JR. and M. C. BEARDSLEY
He owns with toil he wrote the following scenes;
But, if they're naught, ne'er spare him for his pains:
Damn him the more; have no commiseration
For dullness on mature deliberation.
William Congreve, Prologue to
The Way of the World
THE claim of the author's "intention" upon the critic's
judgment has been challenged in a number of recent dis
cussions, notably in the debate entitled The Personal
Heresy, between Professors Lewis and Tillyard, and at least im
plicitly in periodical essays like those in the "Symposiums" of
1940 in the Southern and Kenyon Reviews.1 But it seems doubt
ful 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 Dictionary2 of literary
criticism, raised the issue but were unable to pursue its implica
tions at any length. We argued that the design or intention of
the author is neither available nor desirable as 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 scholar
ship, and about some trends of contemporary poetry, especially
its allusiveness. There is hardly
a
problem of literary criticism
inwhich 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
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 469
know what he intended." Intention is design or
plan in the au
thor's mind. Intention has obvious affinities for the author's at
titude toward his work, the way he felt, what made him write.
We begin our discussion with a series of propositions sum
marized and abstracted to a degree where they seem to us axio
matic, if not truistic.
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.
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 indoing 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 be
come effective in the poem. "Only one caveat must be borne in
mind," says an eminent intentionalist3 in a moment when his the
ory repudiates itself; "the poet's aim must be judged at the mo
ment of the creative act, that is to say, by the art of the poem
itself."
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
itsmedium iswords?yet it isy simply is, in the sense that we have
no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant.4 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 re
spect poetry differs from practical messages, which are success
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470 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
ful if and only if we correctly infer the intention. They are
more abstract than poetry.
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 universal
ized). 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 a
biographical act of inference.
5. If there is any sense in which an author, by revision, has
better achieved his original intention, it is only the very abstract,
tautological,
sense that he intended to write a better work and
now has done it. (In this sense every author's intention is the
same.) His former specific 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."5
"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."8 He has
diagnosed very accurately two forms of irresponsibility, one which
he prefers. 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 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
or morals. Mr. Richards has aptly called the poem a class?
"a class of experiences which do not differ in any character more
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 471
than a certain amount . . . from a standard experience." And
he adds, "We may take as this standard experience the relevant
experience of the poet when contemplating the completed
com
position." Professor Wellek in a fine essay on the problem has
preferred to call the poem "a system of norms," "extracted from
every individual experience," and he objects to Mr. Richards'
deference to the poet as reader. We side with Professor Wellek
in not wishing to make the poet (outside the poem)
an authority.
A critic of our Dictionary article, Mr. Ananda K. Coomara
swamy, has argued7 that there are two kinds of enquiry about a
wrork 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),
Mr. 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: 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 skilful murder and a skilful poem. A skilful murder
is an
example which Mr. 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 ac
cording to plan is "artistically" successful. We maintain that
(2) is an enquiry 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).
II
It is not so much an empirical
as an
analytic judgment, not a
historical statement, but a definition, to say that the intentional
fallacy is a romantic one. When a rhetorician, presumably of the
first century A.D., writes: "Sublimity is the echo of a great soul,"
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472 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
or 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
so romantic a critic as Saintsbury. One may wish to argue whether
Longinus should be called romantic,8 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 sensi
ble, 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 roman
ticism. The beautiful is the successful intuition-expression, and
the ugly is the unsuccessful; the intuition or private part of art
it the aesthetic fact, and the medium or
public part in not the
subject of aesthetic at all. Yet aesthetic reproduction takes place
only "if all the other conditions remain equal."
Oil-paintings grow dark, frescoes fade, statues lose noses . . .
the text of a poem is corrupted by bad copyists or bad print
ing.
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 labours ... 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.9
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 close analysis
of the meaning or "spirit" of a
play of Shakespeare or Corneille
?a process that involves close historical study but remains aes
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 473
thetic criticism?or he may write sociology, biography, or other
kinds of non-aesthetic history. The Crocean system seems to
have given more of a boost to the latter way of writing.
"What has the poet tried to do," asks Spingarn in his 1910
Columbia Lecture from which we have already quoted, "and
how has he fulfilled his intention?" The place to look for "in
superable" ugliness, says Bosanquet, in his third Lecture of 1914,
is the "region of insincere and affected art." The seepage of
the theory into a non-philosophic place may be seen in such a
book as Marguerite Wilkinson's inspirational New Voices, about
the poetry of 1919 to 1931?where symbols "as old as the ages
. . . retain their strength and freshness" through "Realization."
We close this section with two examples from quarters where
one might least expect a taint of the Crocean. Mr. I. A. Richards'
fourfold distinction of meaning into "sense," "feeling," "tone,"
"intention" has been probably the most influential statement of
intentionalism in the past fifteen years, though it contains a hint
of self-repudiation: "This function [intention]," says Mr. Rich
ards, "is not on all fours with the others." In an essay on "Three
Types of Poetry" Mr. Allen T?te writes as follows:
We must understand that the lines
Life like a dome of many-colored glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity
are not poetry; they express the frustrated will
trying to compete with science. The will asserts
a rhetorical proposition about the whole of life,
but the imagination has not seized upon the mater
ials of the poem and made them into a whole. Shel
ley's simile is imposed upon the material from
above; it does not grow out of the material.
The last sentence contains a promise of objective analysis which
is not fulfilled. The reason why the essay relies so
heavily
throughout on the terms "will" and "imagination" is that Mr.
T?te is accusing the romantic poets of a kind of insincerity (ro
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474 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
manticism in reverse) and at the same time is trying to describe
something mysterious and perhaps indescribable, an "imaginative
whole of life," a "wholeness of vision at a
particular moment
of experience," something which "yields us the quality of the
experience." If a poet had a toothache at the moment of con
ceiving
a poem, that would be part of the experience, but Mr.
T?te of course does not mean anything like that. He is think
ing about some kind of "whole" which in this essay at least he
does not describe, but which doubtless it is the prime need of
criticism to describe?in terms that may be publicly tested.
Ill
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
mav have been part of a rigorously ascetic view in which we
hardly wish to 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 affec
tionately remembered, has proceeded from the poets themselves.
Certainly the poets have had something to say that the ana
lyst 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 tranquillity. But it is necessary that we realize the
character and authority of such testimony. There is only a fine
shade between those romantic expressions and a kind of earnest
advice that authors often give. Thus Edward Young, Carlyle,
Walter Pater:
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 475
I know two golden rules from ethicsy 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
flerey 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 the
following 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 par
ticular, only looking at things around me and following the
progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind,
writh 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
tranquillity"?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 soul, listen
to the sound of your own inside voice, discover and express the
vraie v?rit?.
2
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476 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
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 if taught how to manage himself honestly.10 All this,
however, would appear to belong to an art separate from criticism,
or to a
discipline which one might call the psychology of com
position, valid and useful, an individual and private culture, yoga,
or system of self-development which the young poet would do
well to notice, but different from the public science of evaluating
poems,
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 argu
ment, 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 else
where and in quite other terms.
The day may arrive when the psychology of composition is
unified with the science of objective evaluation, but so far they
are separate. It would be convenient if the passwords of the
intentional school, "sincerity," "fidelity," "spontaneity," "au
thenticity," "genuineness," "originality," could be equated with
terms of analysis such as "integrity," "relevance," "unity," "func
tion"; with "maturity," "subtlety," and "adequacy," and other
more precise axiological terms?in short, if "expression" always
meant aesthetic communication. But this is not so.
"Aesthetic" art, says Professor Curt Ducasse, an ingenious
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 477
theorist of expression, is the conscious objectification of feelings,
in which an intrinsic part is the critical moment. The artist cor
rects 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."11 What is the standard by which
we disown or accept the self? Professor Ducasse does not say.
Whatever itmay be, however, this standard is an element in the
definition of art which will not reduce to terms of objectification.
The evaluation of the work of art remains public; the work is
measured against something outside the author.
IV
There is criticism of poetry and there is, as we have seen,
author psychology, which when applied to the present or future
takes the form of inspirational promotion; but author psychology
can be historical too, and then we have literary biography, a
legitimate and attractive study in itself, one
approach, as Mr.
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 dis
covered 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 diction
aries, 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
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478 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
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 semi-private 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 word's history and
meaning.12 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, itmay 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 criticwho is concerned with type (2) and with (3) where
it shades into (2).
The whole glittering parade of Professor Lowes' Road to
Xanadu, for instance, runs along the border between types (2)
and (3)
or
boldly traverses the romantic region of (2).
"
cKubla
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 clus
ters in the deep well of Coleridge's memory, and which then
coalesced and issued forth as poems. If there was nothing "hap
hazard or fortuitous" in the way the images returned to the sur
face, that may mean ( 1) that Coleridge could not produce what
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 479
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," "Imagina
tion 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 about "the streamy nature of associa
?,1,-3
tion."
"Wohin der Weg?" quotes Professor Lowes for the motto of
his book. "Kein Weg! Ins Unbetretene." Precisely because
the way is unbetreten ywe should say, it leads away from the
poem. Bartram's Travels contains a
good deal of the history of
certain words and romantic Floridan 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. Per
haps
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 y 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 ll?c, ?>f sensory and mental experience, which lies behind and
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480 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
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,
especially for the intellectual objects, 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' 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).
In a well-known poem by John Donne appears the following
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 spheres"
is the motion of the greatest complexity.
... As the poem
is a valediction forbidding mourning, the poet must exhort
his love to quietness and calm upon his departure; and for
this purpose the figure based upon the latter motion (trepi
dation), long absorbed into the traditional astronomy, fit
tingly suggests the tension of the moment without arousing
the "harmes and feares" implicit in the figure of the mov
ing earth.1*
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 481
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 with Kepler's De Stella Novay with Gali
leo's Siderius NunciuSy with William Gilbert's De Magnetey and
with Clavius's commentary on the De Sphaera of Sacrobosco.
He refers to the newT science in his Sermon at Paul's Cross and
in a letter to Sir Henry Goodyer. 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 analyz
able vehicle of a complicated metaphor. And one may observe:
( 1) that the movement of the earth according to the Copernican
theory is a celestial motion, smooth and regular, and while it
might cause religious or
philosophic fears, it could not be associ
ated 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 and
sigh-tempests of the second stanza of the poem; (3) that "trepi
dation" is an
appropriate opposite of earthquake, because each is
a
shaking or
vibratory motion; and "trepidation of the spheres"
is "greater far" 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 andmeant"
shows that the event has passed, like an
earthquake, not like the
incessant celestial movement of the earth.
Perhaps a knowl
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482 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
edge 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 geo-centric
and helio-centric antithesis the core of the metaphor is to disre
gard 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 ex
periment.
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 common
place 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 Mr. F. O. Mat
thiessen 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 inmovement, 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.
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 483
Eliot's allusions work when we know them?and to a great extent
even when we do not know them, through their suggestive power.
But sometimes we find allusions supported by notes, and it is a
very nice 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 every
thing of importance
. . . that is apposite to an appreciation of
'The Waste Land'," writes Mr. Matthiessen of Miss Weston's
book, "has been incorporated into the structure of the poem it
self, 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 concenceivable, 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
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484 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
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 con
stitute 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. Mr. 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 ex
tended connecting links in the text itself." But it may be ques
tioned whether the notes and the need for them are not equally
muffling. The omission from poems of the explanatory stratum
on which is built the dramatic or poetic stuff is a
dangerous
responsibility. Mr. 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 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 unas
similated material lying loose beside the poem, necessary for the
meaning of the verbal symbol, but not integrated, so that the
symbol stancis 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. Mr. Matthiessen, for instance, sees that
Eliot's titles for poems and his epigraphs are informative appara
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 485
tus, 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," Mr. Matthiessen believes that the "device" of epigraphs
"is not at all open to the objection of not being sufficiently struc
tural." "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 inmv 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 ar
bitrarily, 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, itmay be in planning too much.1"
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
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486 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
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 implica
tions of what we have been saying. In Eliot's "Love Song of J.
Alfred Pr?f rock," towards the end, occurs the line: "I have heard
the mermaids singing, each to each," and this bears a certain re
semblance to a line in a Song by John Donne, "Teach me to heare
Mermaides singing," so that for the reader acquainted to a cer
tain degree with Donne's poetry, the critical question arises: Is
Eliot's line an allusion to Donne's? Is Pr?f rock 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
Marvel "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 Pr?f rock's mer
maids, 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 G?rard de Nerval. This method of in
quiry may lead to the conclusion that the given resemblance be
tween Eliot and Donne is without significance and is better not
thought of, or the method may have the disadvantage of pro
viding
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 in
quiry, in which, taking advantage of the fact that Eliot is still
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 487
alive, and in the spirit of a man who would settle a bet, the
critic writes to Eliot and asks 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 "Pru
frock;" it would not be a critical inquiry. Critical inquiries, un
like bets, are not settled in this way. Critical inquiries are not
settled by consulting the oracle.
FOOTNOTES
^f. Louis Teeter, "Scholarship and the Art of Criticism," ELE, V (Sept. 1938),
173-94; Rene Wellek, review of Geoffrey Tillotson's Essays in Criticism and Research,
Modem Philology, XLI (May, 1944), 262; G. Wilson Knight, Shakespeare' and Tol
stoy, English Association Pamphlet No. 88 (April, 1934), p. 10; Bernard C. Heyl,
New Bearings in Esthetics and Art Criticism (New Haven, 1943), pp. 66, 113, 149.
2Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T. Shipley (New York, 1924), pp. 326-39.
3J. E. Spingarn, "The New Criticism," in Criticism and America (New York, 1924),
pp. 24-25.
4As critics and teachers constantly do. "We have here a deliberate blurring. . . ."
"Should this be regarded as ironic or as unplanned?" ". . . is the literal meaning in
tended. . .?" "... a paradox of religious faith which is intended to exult. . . ." It
seems to me that Herbert intends. . ." These examples are chosen from three pages
of an issue of The Explicator (Fredericksburg, Va.), vol. II, no. 1 (Oct., 1943). Au
thors often judge their own works in the same way. See This is My Best, ed. Whit
Burnett (New York, 1942), e.g., pp. 539-40.
5A close relative of the intentional fallacy is that of talking about "means" and
"end" in poetry instead of "part" and "whole." We have treated this relation con
cisely in our dictionary article.
6E. E. Stoll, 'The Tempest," PMLA, XLIV (Sept. 1932), 703.
7Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "Intention," The American Bookman, I (Winter, 1944),
41-48.
8For the relation of Longinus to modern romanticism, see R. S. Crane, review of
Samuel Monk's The Sublime, Philological Quarterly, XV (April, 1936), 165-66.
9It is true that Croce himself in his Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille, trans. Doug
las Ainslie (London, 1920), Chapter VII, "The Practical Personality and the Poetical
Personality," and in his Defence of Poetry, trans. E. F. Carritt (Oxford, 1933). p. 24,
has delivered a telling attack on initentionalism, but the prevailing drift of such pas
sages in the Aesthetic as we quote is in the opposite direction.
10See Hughes Mearns, Creative Youth (Garden City, 1925), esp. pp. 10, 27-29. The
technique of inspiring poems keeps pace today with a parallel analysis of the pro
cess of inspiration in successful artists. See Rosamond E. M. Harding, An Anatomy of
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488 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
Inspiration, Cambridge, 1940; Julius Portnoy, A Psychology of Art Creation, Philadel
phia, 1942.
nCurt Ducasse, The Philosophy of Art (New York, 1929), p. 116.
12And the history of words after a poem is written may contribute meanings which
if relevant to the original pattern should not be ruled out by a scruple about intention,
cf. C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy, (Oxford, 1939), p. 16;
Teeter, loc cit., pp. 183, 192: review of Tillotson's Essays, TLS, XLI (April, 1942), 174.
"Chapters VIII, "The Pattern," and XVI, "The Known and Familiar Landscape,"
will be found of most help to the student of the poem.
For an extreme example of intentionalistic criticism, see Kenneth Burke's analysis
of The Ancient Mariner in The Philosophy of Literary Form (Louisiana State Uni
versity Press, 1941), pp. 22-23, 93-102. Mr. Burke must be credited with realizing very
clearly what he is up to.
"Charles M. Coffin, John Donne and the New Philosophy (New York, 1827), pp.
97-98.
15In his critical writings Eliot has expressed the right view of author psychology'
(See The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Cambridge, 1933, p. 139 and "Tra
dition and the Individual Talent" in Selected Essays, New York, 1932), though his
record is not entirely consistent (See A Choice of Kipling's Verse, London, 1941, pp.
10-11, 20-21).
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