Wimsatt and Beardsley, from"The Affective Fallacy"

The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does), a special case of epistemological skepticism, though usually advanced as if it had far stronger claims than the overall forms of skepticism. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. The outcome of either Fallacy, the Intentional or the Affective, is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear."

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In a parallel way, affective theory has often been less a scientific view of literature than a prerogative--that of the soul adventuring among masterpieces, the contagious teacher, the poetic radiator--a magnetic rhapsode Ion, a Saintsbury, a Quiller-Couch, a William Lyon Phelps.  Criticism on this theory has approximated the tone of the Buchamite confession, the revival meeting. “To be quite frank,” says Anatole France, “the critic ought to say: ‘Gentlemen, I am going to speak about myself apropos of Shakespeare, apropos of Racine.’ The sincerity of the critic becomes an issue, as for the intentionalist the sincerity of the poet.

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The report of some readers, on the other hand, that a poem or story induces in them vivid images, intense feelings, or heightened consciousness, is neither anything which can be refuted nor anything which it is possible for the objective critic to take into account. The purely affective report is either too physiological or it is too vague.

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The more specific the account of the emotion induced by a poem, the more nearly it will be an account of the reasons for the emotion, the poem itself, and the more reliable it will be as an account of what the poem is likely to induce in other—sufficiently informed—readers. It will in fact supply the kind of information which will enable readers to respond to the poem.