Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Intentional Fallacy, The Author, The Poem
In talking of the intentional fallacy, it remains a given that the poem in itself is supreme while everything extraneous to the words on the page are impermissible evidence when considering the work. Using Wimsatt and Beardsley standards we could never presume to ask the author, “What did you mean by “x”?” To really seek after the intent or request to know his/her desire for our understanding seems, even to this intention junky, a cop-out for examining the poem. That being said, I believe there is somewhat of a significant difference between inquiring directly after the intent of a work, and using/engaging your other knowledge to arrive at hypotheses of intent (if you so desire those) or merely just a heightened experience of the poem.
I don’t want to linger on this poem, but let us return for a moment to our class reading of Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask.” Before certain biographical and historical facts were presenting surrounding this poem, most students in our class were still able to examine the poem and interpret the poem and the work stood just fine on its own two legs, without any extra knowledge. However, once it was revealed to us that Dunbar was the son of former slaves, living in post civil war America, for many, the poem took on new connotations and meaning. Naturally, we cannot use this knew information as the sole measure by which to judge and interpret the poem, but perhaps it adds new depth and insight. It in no way invalidates the first reading or understanding of the poem.
Wimsatt & Beardsley seem to have an unjustified fear of knowledge. Learning outside information about the poem or poet or social atmosphere can only help a reader. Whether or not these facts exist in the minds of readers, the words on the page, the actual poem, cannot change. Their precious insistence on the autonomy of the poem is not actually threatened by other information because the poem with or without this information, the poem stays just as it was written. The words, the punctuation, the format, the rhythm, all this remains exactly as it was at birth. By insisting that a reader must close themselves off to anything not in the poem for fear this information might sully their reading, is really to have no faith in the readers. We have the capacity to interpret and understand on multiple levels. Information can be both ignored and called upon, whenever the circumstance sees fit and either way, the poem, as Wimsatt and Beardsley would insist, stays central the work of interpretation.
As a slight caveat not in the least appealing to Wimsatt and Beardsley’s mode of consideration, I would also argue that despite what may result in expression at the end of a poem, the author’s motivation and (dare I say) intention, whether explicitly made clear or not, is always in the poem. The poem would never have been without this catalyst and so maybe the poem isn’t all, as Wimsatt and Beardsley would like to think, but maybe those extra details about the life and times of the poet are the true work of the reader to discover, and when these are made open and available for understanding, the poem can really begin its birth.
Just as we must as/assume that this is the true condition of the world in which the writer writes, why is it not also fair to consider other aspects of that same world? While reading, “We Wear the Mask” one must necessarily and sometimes subconsciously consider/inquire after/assume that some condition or state of the world of which the poem speaks includes a state where some are hiding from the world, masquerading behind a decorative lie. If we are allowed to inquire after the world of the poem, then why is it any worse to inquire after those things which inform the world of the poem (i.e the experiences of Dunbar). To assume that a black man would only have something to 
say about a black issue could easily be an oversight, but a far worse oversight would be to assume that his writings had nothing to do with the state of black Americans subsisting in his world. Certainly by granting Dunbar’s poem this contextual reading, one must admit that your relationship to the poem is less intimate, it does not refute another’s access to the poem. This is the primary oversight of Formalism as I understand it now. Much, though not all poetry is confessional or quasi-confessional in nature. Art that grows out of the sufferings of any people group has a particular propensity towards revealing what those who suffered know and experienced. Formalism would seem to want to ignore this reality. The religiosity, the psychology, the anthropology, and all these things form the boning of a poem. The history of the poem, that is to say, from where it came and why, is as essential as the “traditional” beliefs of Formalism.
