The Internal, the External, and the Intermediate

In their essay, "The Intentional Fallacy," Wimsatt and Beardsley contend that an author's intention when writing a work cannot be studied and therefore the question of intentionality is not an appropriate question to ask in the field of literary criticism. They define three types of "evidence" that critics seek out in order to find the meaning of a poem:

1) Internal/Public: "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"

2) External/Private/Idiosyncratic: "not a part of the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of revelations (in journals, for example, or letters or reported conversations) about how or why the poet wrote the poem- to what lady, while sitting on what lawn, or at the death of what friend or brother"

2) Intermediate: "about the character of the author or about private or semi-private meanings attached to words or topics by an author or by a coterie of which he is a member"

While the formalists primarily emphasize the search for evidence which is internal or public, it is interesting to note that they seem to allow for a certain amount of intermediate evidence as well. Wimsatt and Beardsley distinguish between literary critics who concern themselves with either "evidence of type (1) and moderately with that of type (3)" or with "type (2) and with (3) where it shades into (2)." At the end of their article, they establish that in attempting to study allusions in poetry, such as in the example of whether Donne references exists in Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," it is acceptable to perform poetic analysis and exegesis but not to go directly to the author himself and ask about intention. I believe that Wimsatt and Beardsley might consider the scholarly search for connections between Eliot and Donne in order to discern the meaning of "Love Song" to be a search for this intermediate evidence, which is neither completely public nor private and which seeks to understand the associations that authors have in their use of words. The formalists critics would encourage the inclusion of intermediate evidence insofar as it contributes to the reader becoming a scholar of the poem. Far from contemplating or questioning the author's intention, the scientific study of some forms of intermediate evidence allows for a deepened understanding of the objective meaning of the poem. So, instead of imagining what woman inspired Eliot's "Love Song," or examining Eliot's personal life history in the year that he wrote the poem, or even wondering what the author intended with his inclusion of a specific line, the true literary critic limits him or herself to the study of the poem's form, language, and unity. This study might include a rigorous look at the history and meaning of the words, or the intermediate evidence: "The meaning of words is the history of words, and the biography of an author, his use of a word, and the associations which the word had for him, are part of the word's history and meaning."