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An interesting point brought up in the New York Times article had to do with the intentional fallacy. While some of us tend to see it in a bad light today, many scholars of the 1950s saw it as a "license to interpret." Seeing it in the light makes it much more friendly sounding to me. I had a view of the intentional fallacy of robbing the poem and poet of something. I saw the author as an important part of the poetic puzzle. But isn't it true that removing the author altogether gives so much more room for interpretation? If an author comes right out and says what his poem means in no uncertain terms then there is little to no room to interpret anything. However, this made me wonder where the line between the affective fallacy and interpretation is drawn. If the reader's response to the poem is not supposed to matter then why does his interpretation matter at all? I feel like in this instance, the intentional and affective fallacies have backed themselves into a corner. Getting rid of the author allows the reader more freedom, but the reader shouldn't matter either. So then, what does actually matter.

I keep getting a visual of a poem in the page of a book untouched by human hands. Simply sitting there, meaningless, but just "being." What good is a poem in an unopened book. Humanity is what makes poetry worthwhile. Be it the author or the reader. Without human minds the poem is simply a lot of words and a waste of space.

I don't know why this is so hard for me to simply accept. I just think that there must be meaning, or poetry is pointless. It almost seems like we are proving the arguments the ppl make against English majors. "Why do you study poetry? It's so boring. And what does all the fancy language mean anyway?" I can't imagine answering these questions with "oh well, the reader doesn't matter and neither does the author. it's all about the poem itself. " Imagining this in my mind is hilarious, and this could be attributed to the fact that it is 1 am, but our field of study is obscure enough as is. This could only make matters worse.