The following is stuff that sort of bubbled up to the top when thinking about the essay “The Intentional Fallacy,” and while it speaks to the difficult of any evaluation of poetry, it’s not something I’m willing to stand by, just something I present for argument.

The idea of intentional fallacy seems to me inescapable in some ways, though the essay gives me some more context for how it might be better avoided in many of the annotations (and, moving forward, in the class). I think my problem stems from the constant talk about tone in any critical setting. We talk a lot about tone at WWC. I cannot see how any discussion of a speaker’s emotional state can be anything but subjective on the part of the critic and therefore subject to some of the same flaws as the intentional fallacy.

I recognize the difference to a limited degree. The intentional fallacy occurs when the reader supposes that the work’s merit is in some way tied to what the author hoped to accomplish. Tone is focused on the text and not on the author.

But it seems to me that judgment of tone is still wholly subjective. A poem which says “I hate cereal” could be judged by different readers to have wholly different tones. One might think that the speaker is dead serious, that his hatred of cereal is withering and consuming; another might think the speaker prone to hyperbole; another might think the speaker sarcastic. Of course, these interpretations are subject to context, but isn’t any interpretation drawn from the critic’s own experience, as applied to the body of the poem, and therefore suspect? Can’t we then throw out tone entirely as a measurable or observable element of a poem due to that suspicion?

I tend to feel the same way when hearing people talk about the effects of syllabics. It’s wholly subjective; iambs feel no more aggressive to me, by design, than trochees or dactyls. But I feel like I hear statements like that all the time, and if the critic is careful to attribute those emotions to the poem and not to the poet, it passes as valid observation.

How are we to consider, to evaluate a poem without constant self-reference? And how are we to observe when we have first read the poem as a reader, a voracious entity with both an intellectual and emotional appetite, then later attempt to “observe and describe” as though we hadn’t already interacted with, loved or hated or been stymied by or fought with before acquiescing to, a poem? A critic attempts to be a scientist only after he’s had an affair with the subject. We do not, we cannot, read poems as objective scientists, not ever. And once committed to the work as a biased, human, and very fallible reader, it almost seems foolish to bother with a hierarchy of fallibility, where intentional fallacy is bad but emotional or presumptive fallacies are fine.

So that’s where I’m struggling; I feel like the annotation process asks me to be that scientist and I’m never going to be able; I cannot measure the effect of the work without some flavor of informal fallacy. (Obviously, my early annotations, which say “the poem does x to the reader” were poorly veiled references to what the poem did to me; I am the only reader who will ever be relevant to the annotations so it didn’t seem such a rotten linguistic substitution. But I see the necessity for the purposes of awarding credit to the exercise of removing those kinds of statements, and don’t have a problem doing so. It seems a bit askew to ask students to focus on an aspect of the work that they feel they need—and are therefore emotionally committed to—and then ask them not to engage with the work at that level. Beyond concatenating the words, counting the syllables, and observing pattern and deviation, there’s not much one might say without committing some level of autobiography to the page. And simple counting and observing doesn’t seem sufficient to address issues in the writer’s own work; word and syllable counts are hardly teaching tools. So some interpretive fallacy will be necessary to draw any creative fuel from the process, whether it be converse fallacy of accident, non sequitur, or consequent fallacy.)