From Annabel Patterson, “Intention,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Lentricchia & McLaughlin, 1990)

While granting that a poem does not come into existence by accident, Wimsatt and Beardsley were not prepared to grant that the author's intention should serve as a standard by which to judge the perfonnance. They wished, rather, to claim the evaluative function as a monopoly for the critic, whose role was currently being redefined and reemphasized as part of an emergent new discipline, the academic and professionalized study of English Literature.

But there was another, less spoken agenda in "The Intentional Fallacy." Without specifically addressing it, they were also reacting against the emphasis on subjectivity inherited from Romanticism. Wimsatt and Beardsley wished to establish a doctrine of critical impersonality, disassociating its procedures from those of literary biography, its concerns from those of psychology, and authorial voice from the notion of the persona or speaker in a lyric poem, which is therefore designated not an expression of its author's feelings but a dramatic utterance. In place of the concept of authorial responsibility for or ownership of a poem's meaning (a kind of intellectual copyright) Wimsatt and Beardsley claimed (like Prynne's judges) that any text, once published, is publicly owned; a statement that, when applied to poetry, in effect meant released into the custody of critics. The entire essay assumed that public and objective standards of evaluation were at least conceivable, and were more likely to be arrived at if the author's subjectivity was kept as far as possible out of the picture. The problem of the critic's subjectivity and how it might be substituted (or mistaken) for public standards . . . went unconsidered.

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In sum, Wimsatt and Beardsley were, despite beginning with a series of "axioms," somewhat less regulatory in their own intentions than some of their followers. It is important to remember that the initial focus of their argument was (a) evaluative and (b) specifically directed to poetry, especially lyric poetry, restrictions upon their theory which, while not stated as restrictions, gave their views as originally stated more plausibility than when they were extended to a general anti-intentionalism in literary studies. They were explicit about the relation of their endeavor to the poetry contemporary with themselves, whose allusiveness, epitomized by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and its authorial notes, seemed to require some rethinking of critical procedures, of the relation of what was internal to the text to what was outside or precedent to it. And they were certainly acute in recognizing that the concept of intention formed a crucial theoretical node in their discipline, entailing "many specific truths about inspiration, authenticity, biography, literary history and scholarship" (1). "There is hardly," they averred in their opening paragraph, "a problem of literary criticism in which the critic's approach will not be qualified by his view of 'intention'" (1). What they did not do, and what was subsequently done to their argument, with disastrous results for its intelligibility, was to extend their axioms about evaluation to interpretation. While the word "meaning" appears from time to time in their essay and its subsequent published clarifications, it is not central to the problematic they thought they faced; they defined it as a problem in aesthetics, not in hermeneutics.

That the shift occurred was perhaps inevitable, in view of the changed function of criticism itself. If evaluation was the primary task of the critic, as Alexander Pope understood it in his Essay on Criticism in the early eighteenth century, by the middle of the twentieth century, and largely thanks to the New Criticism, with its preference for difficulty in poetry, the critical task was primarily that of detailed exegesis. The question of intentionality was therefore transferred to the problem of whether authorial intention could or should be invoked as a tool in the task of meaning's excavation.