Who Decides What Your Poem Really Means?
The Day I Wrote a Poem
You write a short poem about a dragon that lives in your cupboard. Your teacher reads it aloud and says it is really about the fear of growing up. You shake your head. You were just writing about a dragon. Who gets the final say — you, the author, or the reader who finds a meaning you never thought of?
The American philosopher Monroe Beardsley (1915–1985) spent his whole career thinking about that question. He argued that once a poem, a painting, or a song leaves your hands, it belongs to the world. Even your own private intentions do not settle what the work means. That idea set off a giant argument that still matters today — and not just in art class.
The Artist’s Intention: Should We Care?
In 1946 Beardsley and his co-author William Wimsatt published a paper with a title that sounded like a crime: “The Intentional Fallacy.” The intentional fallacy is the mistake of thinking that what an artist intended to mean is automatically what the work means. Beardsley said that is a fallacy — a logical mistake.
He compared judging a poem to judging a pudding. You taste the pudding. You do not call the chef to ask what she hoped you would taste. A work of art, Beardsley thought, is like any other artifact — a thing made by a person but then set loose into the world. Its parts (words, colors, sounds) are public and can be examined by anyone. The critic should look at the work itself, not at notebooks, diaries, or interviews. He called information inside the work internal evidence and everything else — letters, journals, the artist’s stated intentions — external evidence, and he said only internal evidence should count.
Humpty Dumpty’s Magic Word
Beardsley had a favorite test case: Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass. Humpty Dumpty says, “There’s glory for you!” and tells Alice it means “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you.” When Alice protests, Humpty Dumpty smugly explains that when he uses a word, it means exactly what he chooses it to mean.
Beardsley thought this was absurd. The meaning of a sentence does not depend on the whim of the person who speaks it. It depends on public conventions of usage — the shared habits of a whole speaking community. A poet cannot simply announce that “dragon” meant “homework” in his poem and expect anyone to understand him. If no one else shares that meaning, then, Beardsley argued, the poet has not actually communicated anything — and the poem cannot really mean that.
The Secret Diary Defense
Not everyone agreed. Other thinkers, such as E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (b. 1928), pushed back hard. Hirsch argued that the meaning of a text simply is what the writer meant. Knowing the author’s intention is knowing the meaning, full stop.
Many philosophers take a middle ground. They admit that an artist’s intention does not have absolute power, but they say it still provides some real evidence. Suppose a poem uses a private nickname or an obscure historical reference. Your best clue might be a letter the poet wrote to her sister. Even Beardsley eventually admitted that intentions are not totally disconnected from meaning — he agreed that there is a causal link. The artist’s idea causes the work to have certain features, so knowing the intention is like knowing a parent’s height is a clue to a child’s height. But Beardsley still insisted it was only indirect evidence, and a critic’s main job is to keep her eyes on the work itself, not the biography.
A Toilet in an Art Gallery
The fight over intention shows up even more dramatically when people ask a simpler-sounding question: what makes something art in the first place? In 1917 Marcel Duchamp put an ordinary urinal into an art show and called it Fountain. If just anyone can take a factory-made object and call it art, then it looks like whatever the artist intends to be art becomes art. Beardsley rejected that.
He offered his own definition: a work of art is, roughly, an arrangement of things that was intended to be capable of giving an experience with marked aesthetic character — an experience that catches your attention through how the thing looks, sounds, or feels. Notice the twist. Beardsley’s definition builds the artist’s intention into what makes something art. But once the object is an artwork, he fought to keep the creator’s intentions out of deciding what the work means. A religious icon might be made to bring worshippers closer to God, yet its aesthetic intention is what makes it art — while its specific meaning is still whatever a careful observer can find in the work itself.
Why This Still Matters When You Hit “Send”
You are not writing epic poems every day, but you do send texts, post comments, share stories. Beardsley’s idea creeps into all of that. Have you ever said “That’s not what I meant!” after a friend misread your message? According to Beardsley, what you meant is not what counts — what counts is what the words actually do in the public world. The text is its own little artifact now.
That can feel unfair. Yet it is also why reading and listening are skills that matter. If meaning were always locked inside the author’s head, no one would ever need to argue about a book in English class or a lyric in a song — you would just ask the creator and be finished. The fact that works can outrun their makers is why they can surprise us, why they can belong to many people, and why conversations about them never really end.
Beardsley’s battle over the intentional fallacy is not about winning. It is about where you choose to look: at the person who made the thing, or at the thing itself. That choice changes what you hear.
Think about it
- If you write a short story and someone finds a meaning you definitely did not intend, is it wrong for them to say the story means that? Why, or why not?
- In a world where the artist’s intention settled every argument, what would book clubs or English classes actually do? Would anything be lost?
- When you send a text and a friend gets upset, how much responsibility falls on you for what you “really meant,” and how much on the words themselves — as they would be read by anyone?
