Why did W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue that critics should focus on the artwork rather than the artist’s intentions?

In their influential 1946 essay, "The Intentional Fallacy," W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argued against the common practice of judging a work of art based on the artist's intended purpose. They contended that relying on authorial intent forces the critic to abandon literary analysis in favor of becoming a cultural historian or psychologist, focusing on the artist's mental or physical state rather than the work itself.12

This perspective was central to New Criticism, a movement that emphasized the intrinsic value of art. New Critics insisted that a work of art should be treated as an independent unit of meaning. By rejecting external biographical or historical data, they argued that critics could focus on the text itself through close reading, where the poem's meaning is found in its specific language, structure, and unresolved tensions. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the work exists as an autonomous object, and its success or failure is determined by its own internal qualities rather than by how well it matches the creator's original intentions.312