what does it even matter?

Today in class, we discussed Wimsatt & Beardsley's "Intentional Fallacy." In their essay, they bring up the question of whether it's legitimate to ask the poet a question sounding similar to "What did you mean by this line?"

After thinking about this query, I don't necessarily think it is always legitimate to ask such a question. Does it bring us any further revelation about the meaning of the poem itself? Not really. According to Wimsatt & Beardsley, intentional fallacy "begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism" (1388). Essentially, what these two critics are saying is if we dig too deep into what the poet was experiencing when they wrote a poem, we get only answers to what was going on in the poet's life--it doesn't add to the richness of the poem itself. We'll find out loads about the poet's personal life, great. But perhaps it doesn't really help us understand the poem any better. There is sometimes a reason that the poet keeps lines ambiguous--so that the words can mean many things to many people. Thus, in discussing all these different meanings, we create a HETEROGLOSSIA. yikes, that's more postmodern than anything I had previously mentioned. I better not cross into that realm yet...

quote taken from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2001.