Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy"

In their article "The Intentional Fallacy," Wimsatt and Beardsley argue against the traditional reliance on authorial intention as a basis for critical judgment in poetry and literature as a whole. They reject the idea of the author as the ultimate authority on their work and propose that the critic's role should be focused on analyzing the internal workings of the literary piece. According to Wimsatt and Beardsley, the poem itself is of primary importance as a literary artifact , separate from the author's psychological state or biography. They criticize the approach that gives excessive importance to authorial intentions and suggest that it leads to arbitrary evaluations and unproductive speculation. While not explicitly invoking "science" as Eichenbaum did in his explanation of the Formalist method, Wimsatt and Beardsley criticize "intentionalists" for engaging in unscientific approaches to literature. They argue that the quest to determine author…