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I got yer authorial intention right here, or: Wordsworth on the beach

9 o'clock, July 25, 2005

Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels say: “The meaning of a text is simply identical to the author’s intended meaning.” John Holbo says:

An ashtray did my spirit seal;
I rode no human shoes;
She seemed a vase that could not feel
The tent of earthly news.
No anthill has she now, no horse;
She neither knits nor toasts.
Rolled round in earth’s bejeweléd course,
With frogs, and blots, and ghosts.

When someone else uses a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.

Comments

So that the meaning of John Holbo's poem is "look, I can write a silly but interesting poem disproving the notion of authorial intention..."? :-)

—— Benjamin Rosenbaum, 7:20 AM, Tuesday, July 26, 2005

He does seem to have undermined his argument by prefacing it with that example, in spite of his attempts to mitigate that farther down. The fact remains that the poem was written by Holbo, with his wife and Wordsworth as witting and unwitting accomplices, and with the sole intent of proving he's a wiseacre. What else do you need to know? It's therefore quite different from the fictitious-anthropic words-in-sand and words-on-rock examples.

But hey, the mad lib's broken! I just tried to rhyme "course" with "cheese."

—— Jackie M., 9:03 AM, Tuesday, July 26, 2005

But is that the meaning of the poem, or only the intention of the author? (Even stipulating that there's an author, and I think Holbo makes a reasonable case that there isn't.) Is there any way in which the poem, absent its context, actually conveys that meaning?

—— David Moles, 9:23 AM, Tuesday, July 26, 2005