Two readers can finish the same poem with opposite ideas of what it means. Often they turn to the author to settle it: what did the poet mean? But authors die, forget, change their minds or refuse to explain. And sometimes a work seems to say more, or less, than its maker planned. Who decides what a work means: the maker, the audience, or the work itself?

Actual intentionalism

The commonsense view is simple. Actual intentionalism holds that a work means what its maker intended it to mean. When we read a letter, we try to work out what the writer meant; why treat a poem differently? The literary theorist E. D. Hirsch defended this view in 1967, arguing that without the author's intention as an anchor, interpretation has no standard of correctness and anything goes.

Intentionalists point to irony. Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (1729) recommends, in a calm and reasonable voice, that the Irish poor sell their babies as food for the rich. Read literally, it is monstrous. We know A Modest Proposal is satire largely because we know Swift's purpose: he was attacking the way the powerful treated the Irish poor as mere numbers.

The intentional fallacy

In 1946 the critics W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published an essay called "The Intentional Fallacy." They argued that the author's design is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging a literary work. The intentional fallacy, for Wimsatt and Beardsley, is judging a work by its author's aims instead of by the work itself. If the poem succeeds, it shows what the poet meant; if it fails, the poet's private wishes cannot rescue it. The evidence that counts is public: the words, their meanings in the language, and the conventions of the form.

This anti-intentionalism shaped the New Criticism, which trained generations of students to read closely without leaning on biography. A more radical version came from the French critic Roland Barthes, whose 1967 essay "The Death of the Author" described a text as a weave of earlier writings. Barthes argued that meaning is made by readers, not fixed by the author.

Middle positions

Many philosophers now take a middle road. Hypothetical intentionalism, defended by Jerrold Levinson, holds that a work means what an informed audience would best judge its author to have intended. It allows context, such as the author's time, place and other public works, but not private diaries that contradict the text.

Moderate actual intentionalists, such as Noël Carroll, give real intentions more weight. For moderate actual intentionalists, an author's real intention counts when it fits what the work can mean. It cannot make words mean what they cannot mean. If a poet writes about a cat sitting on a mat and later claims the poem is about the fall of Rome, the claim fails, because nothing in the words supports it.

Why context still matters

Even anti-intentionalists cannot ignore history entirely. In a 1970 essay called "Categories of Art," Kendall Walton showed that what we see in a work depends on what kind of work we take it to be. Walton argued that how a work looks depends on the category, such as style or genre, in which it is perceived. A Cubist painting judged as a realist picture looks like a clumsy failure; seen as Cubism, it looks bold and inventive. So knowing when, where and in what tradition a work was made changes what we can perceive in it.

Interpretation also differs from evaluation. One can ask what a work means and then, separately, whether it is any good. Nor must there be a single right answer. Critical pluralists hold that a work can support more than one valid interpretation, while critical monists insist on one correct reading. Pluralists are not relativists: they still reject readings the work cannot support.

Worked example: whose song is it?

In 1984 Bruce Springsteen released "Born in the U.S.A." Its verses describe a working-class Vietnam veteran who comes home to no job and no help; the chorus shouts the title over a pounding drum. That September, President Ronald Reagan praised the message of hope in Springsteen's songs during a campaign stop in New Jersey, and the song was widely heard as a straightforward patriotic anthem. Springsteen said that was a misreading.

An actual intentionalist sides with Springsteen: he meant a protest, so it is one. An anti-intentionalist looks only at the work and still finds bitterness in the verses, set against a chorus that does sound triumphant. Barthes would say the crowds who sang it as a celebration made a meaning of their own. A hypothetical intentionalist asks what an informed listener, aware of the lyrics and of Springsteen's other songs about struggling workers, would conclude he intended: almost certainly an angry, ironic anthem. Category matters too: heard as a stadium chorus, it lifts; read as a lyric sheet, it mourns. The case shows why most critics today weigh text, context and intention together.