The Intentional Fallacy

After learning about the intentional fallacy in a number of my English classes, I am no closer to fully understanding it. I understand what it is, what the poet intended is what the poem means, but I cannot wrap my mind around what that means for poetry as a whole. I think that it is absolutely legitimate to look at author intentions in order to gain insight into a poem. After all, they are the writer and creator of the work. This is not to say that I do not think that good poetry can and should stand on its own. On the contrary, I believe that the best of poetry does stand on its own. However, I think that by ignoring author intent we are laying waste to a great deal of information. I think it is important to look into author intent, but I do not feel that this should be the only information that allows readers some insight.

The most applicable example I can think to use is that of "We Wear the Mask." When looking at this poem without any knowledge of the author, his intent or background it can mean any number of things. I am sure when we participated in the class free write that everyone came up with differing beliefs about the information contained in the poem. It meant different things to all of us. When we were told about the author, it did change the way some people viewed the poem, but others continued to see the poem as a separate entity.

I personally like to think as the poem and poet as two ultimately separate things, but there is no reason to think that they cannot ever overlap. Looking at a poem only through the lens of author intent definitely cheapens it, because it then loses its many facets of meaning. In some cases the poem become less applicable and more distant to the reader. To look at "We Wear the Mask" as a poem written about African American history and slavery is fine, but it does close a lot of doors for many of the readers. In our class alone, if we were to look at the poem through this lens, the majority of us would lose our sense of relatedness to it, and our understanding as it was in our free writes would dissipate. Instead of harping on author intent as the end all and be all of a poem's meaning, I think it is better to look at poetic meaning like the layers of an onion.
One layer of meaning that cannot be ignored is that of the author's purpose. However, underneath this layer there are countless interpretations and meanings that the same poem has evoked. There should be a balance between our understanding of the poem through the "eyes" of the author, and our understanding of the poem as a separate entity. The only problem that I can find with this, is that for some it will be difficult to know about the author and restrain oneself from applying this knowledge to the poem.

I am not sure if any of this is making sense, or coming out the way I had hoped, but I simply mean to say that the meaning of good poems come from a number of sources, and one of theses sources is the author. Author intent should be tantamount to all other layers and sources of meaning.