The affective fallacy "is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does). It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism."

"The outcome of either fallacy . . . is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear."

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        Wimsatt and Beardsley charge criticism which takes account of authorial intention in a work with commiting a fallacy--the intentional fallacy. The intentional fallacy "is a confusion between the poem and its origins . . . it begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism." While they do not deny the presence of an authorial intention, they deny the importance or usefulness of looking for such an intention as part of analyzing a work. "To insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's performance." Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that the poem must work on its own, independent of any meeting or not meeting of an authorial intention which a reader would have no immediate way of knowing about in the first place. "Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work." The thoughts and feelings expressed in a poem should be imputed to "the dramatic speaker," and not to the author.
        Poems belong neither to the author nor the critic. In the final analysis "the poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge." Criticism must shed its concern with the genetic cause of the poem and focus on the poem itself. "The text itself [is what] remains to be dealt with, the analyzable vehicle of a complicated metaphor."
        Wimsatt and Beardsley differentiate between the internal and external evidences for the meaning of a poem. The internal is what is public: "it is discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture." The external is "private or idiosyncratic; not part of the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of revelations . . . about how or why the poet wrote the poem." They also speak of an "intermediate kind of evidence" which focuses on "private or semiprivate meanings attached to words or topics by an author." This use of biographical evidence, according to W&B, "need not involve intentionalism, because while it may be evidence of what the author intended, it may also be evidence of the meaning of his words and the dramatic character of his utterance."
        Critical questions cannot be answered effectively by consulting the intentions even of still-living authors: "Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle."
        The affective fallacy "is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does) [W&B would probably accuse Burke's "sociological criticism' of being an example of the affective fallacy.] . . . . It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism." "The outcome of either fallacy . . . is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear." W&B claim that such criticism often produces unhelpful oversimplifications of the poem itself, and depends too heavily on the varied and subjective reactions of various readers to be valuable as criticism.