Day of the Leopards: Essays in Defense of Poems

This is an absorbing and challenging collection of essays by a leading light of the New Criticism school. Well worth turning to after the gibberish of subsequent schools. It can restore your faith in critical thinking and keep the old brain cells alive. I took a course with him at Yale in 1963 and was in class when the bell in Harkness Tower began to toll. He was handed a message, read it and announced, "The President has been assinated." He was a tall man -- 6'4" or more I think --and intimidating with his physical presence as well as his mind, but very thoughtful and kind. A great teacher.

I read this book for a graduate seminar on the philosophy of art. W. K. Wimsatt's, "Day of the Leopards: Essays in Defense of Poems," takes a "shot across the bow" of the neo-Romantic artworld's belief that an artwork reflects what the artist means or intends it to mean. Wimsatt's argument is that artistic intention is irrelevant when it comes to the interpretation of an artist's work. At the time, this was a groundbreaking theory that seemed to give critical support to the new Abstract Expressionist works created by such pioneer artists as Jackson Pollock. However, most of Wimsatt's "intentional fallacy" argument takes aim at the written word of poetry and literature. He argues, "That literary works are self-sufficient entities, whose properties are decisive in checking interpretations and judgments. This is sometimes called the Principle of Autonomy, and it is of course the subject of much dispute." It is in the artform of literature, that their theory has created the biggest stir and much "push back" to their notion, by accusing them of metaphorically "murdering the author" by arguing that once a work is written, an artist's intentions no longer have any bearing on the work. Wimsatt's intentional fallacy notion created quite a stir within the artworld when he opened his argument with the statement, "That the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art, and it seems to us that this is a principle which goes deep into some differences in the history of critical attitudes." The "deep differences" of critical attitudes that Wimsatt speaks about points directly to the artform of literature, which since the nineteenth century, was dominated by the neo-Romantic adherents of the "expression" theory. It is important to understand what Wimsatt is essentially arguing against in their intentional fallacy theory, which is what is at the very core of the expression theory. A basic tenant of the expression theory is the idea when engaging an artwork, that it is important one needs to recognize the power of the artwork's ability in being able to focus on the mind of both the creator and the audience. Thus, expression theorists expect artworks will produce certain human emotions in the audience. The expression theory correctly recognizes that art, especially literature, possesses a certain power in being able to articulate the communicative and educative power of the mind and emotions of the artist to the audience. Wimsatt supported his argument with several axioms. Their first one was that, "A poem does not come into existence by accident." However, although he agrees that the cause of the poem is through the mind of an author, he does not believe that the author's design or intention should be used as a standard to judge the poem's ultimate worth as successful literature. Therefore, unlike the expression theory, only the artwork matters. Thus, for W