As I was telling you about in my last post, my high school English teacher had some pretty formalist ideas about interpreting poetry. I would always become frustrated when I had to interpret something because I would try to relate it to the world I know but the poems always seemed to be about communism or something strange to me. One of the famous quotes I remember my teacher always saying is, "you can interpret a poem in any way you want as long as you can support it from the text."This seems, for me, to relate to Wimsatt and Beardsley's affective fallacy. You can't just talk about how the poem made you feel, but had to talk about what the poem "is."

We weren't allowed to talk about what the poem means to us in our situation because that delves into water of relativism. Analyzing poems in that way feels so scientific. Breaking down each line, each word and examining the significance of each word seems to reduce the brillancy of a poem. And it is confusing as to what exactly Wimsatt and Beardsley mean by what a poem is. I can distinguish what a poem does (what emotion it evokes, the reader's response), but knowing what a poem is is difficult especially when you take away the author's intention. If the reader's response does not give significant meaning to the poem and if the author's intention doesn't either, what exactly does give it its meaning?