Wimsatt was born in Washington D.C., attended Georgetown University and, later, Yale University, where he received his Ph.D. In 1939, Wimsatt joined the English Department at Yale, where he taught until his death in 1975. In his lifetime, Wimsatt became known for his studies of eighteenth-century literature (Leitch et al. 1372). He wrote many works of literary theory and criticismWimsatt was influenced by Monroe Beardsley, with whom he wrote some of his most important pieces. Wimsatt also drew on the work of both ancient critics (such as Longinus and Aristotle) and more contemporary writers (such as T. S. Eliot and the writers of the Chicago School) to formulate his theories, often by highlighting key ideas in those authors’ works in order to refute them.
Theories
Wimsatt contributed several theories to the critical landscape, particularly through his major work, Verbal Icon (of which some of the ideas are discussed below). His ideas generally centre around the same questions tackled by many critics: what is poetry and how does one evaluate it?
Intentional Fallacy
Perhaps Wimsatt’s most influential theories come from the essays “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy” (both are published in Verbal Icon) which he wrote with Monroe Beardsley. Each of these texts “codifies a crucial tenet of New Critical formalist orthodoxy,” making them both very important to twentieth-century criticism (Leitch et al. 1371).
The Intentional Fallacy, according to Wimsatt, derives from “confusion between the poem and its origins” (Verbal Icon 21) – essentially, it occurs when a critic puts too much emphasis on personal, biographical, or what he calls “external” information when analyzing a work (they note that this is essentially the same as the “Genetic fallacy” in philosophical studies; 21). Wimsatt and Beardsley consider this strategy a fallacy partly because it is impossible to determine the intention of the author — indeed, authors themselves are often unable to determine the “intention” of a poem — and partly because a poem, as an act that takes place between a poet and an audience, has an existence outside of both and thus its meaning can not be evaluated simply based on the intentions of or the effect on either the writer or the audience(see the section of this article entitled “The Affective Fallacy" for a discussion of the latter; 5). For Wimsatt and Beardsley, intentional criticism becomes subjective criticism, and so ceases to be criticism at all. For them, critical inquiries are resolved through evidence in and of the text — not “by consulting the oracle” (18).
Affective Fallacy
The Affective fallacy (identified in the essay of the same name, which Wimsatt co-authored with Monroe Beardsley, as above) refers to “confusion between the poem and its results” (Verbal Icon 21; italics in original). It refers to the error of placing too much emphasis on the effect that a poem has on its audience when analyzing it.
Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that the effect of poetic language alone is an unreliable way to analyze poetry because, they contend, words have no effect in and of themselves, independent of their meaning. It is impossible, then, for a poem to be “pure emotion” (38), which means that a poem’s meaning is not “equivalent to its effects, especially its emotional impact, on the reader” (Leitch et al. 1371).
As with the Intentional fallacy, engaging in affective criticism is too subjective an exercise to really warrant the label “criticism” at all — thus, for Wimsatt and Beardsley, it is a fallacy of analysis.
Major works
Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry
Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism
Literary Criticism: A Brief History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kurtz_Wimsatt,_Jr.
