Where authority lies

In reading Wimsatt and Beardsley's formalist ideas, my instinct is to regard them skeptically. First they establish that the author's intentions in writing poetry are absolutely not valid criteria on which we can judge a poem. Alright, so once the poet crafts their words and presents them to the public, then the words must stand on their own. I suppose I can go along with that. Words can be manipulated in interpreted in so many ways, and so by releasing their recorded words to the public, I can see how an author also signs away their rights to controlling the interpretation of their words in a way. But Wimsatt and Beardsley go further with their Affective Fallacy to declare that the readers emotive response to poem are also not worthy criteria that we can use to judge poetry. I'm left with the blaring question, "Where does poetic authority come from!?"

Apparently, it lies within the text itself. But what is the text if it's not a transfer of words between one person's creative intentions and another person's response to those? Sure, a lot of intention might get lost in the transfer, and some interpretive or emotive inclinations in the reader might interfere with their reading of the poem, but I think those things are perfectly valid. The formalists are trying to objectify poetry and transform writing into some kind of scientific process. But so much of poetry deals with manipulating language and using it in unconventional ways, and that seems to indicate the need for us to regard it subjectively. If we disregard the role of the people in dealing with the text, then it becomes nothing but a lifeless set of words.

When Wimsatt and Beardsley claim that asking the author their intention of a writing a poem is not a critical inquiry ("Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle"), I had to question this idea. While the idea of intention is blurry because a writer may not even be able to clearly verbalize their intention, and it's something which we can only speculate about on our own, I think that the writer has as credible an input on the poem as any other person who reads it. They offer a different perspective, which Wimsatt and Beardsley may distinguish as a psychological inquiry that has nothing to contribute to a critical analysis of the poem. But I think it adds another dimension to the poem, and I don't know that it should be held completely separate from the poem itself.

I found two videos on youtube that have distinctly different takes on Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask," and I thought it was interesting to watch them together. This one ties into a sort of African identity at the root of the contemporary African American's life: