This essay opens by noting that its subject was recently debated by E.M.W. Tillyard and C.S. Lewis in the collection The Personal Heresy. This essay claims that "judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work." It presents two methods to analyze T.S. Eliot's possible allusion to a song by John Donne when Prufrock thinks he's heard the mermaids singing. It concludes that attempting to deter
This essay opens by noting that its subject was recently debated by E.M.W. Tillyard and C.S. Lewis in the collection The Personal Heresy. This essay claims that "judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work." It presents two methods to analyze T.S. Eliot's possible allusion to a song by John Donne when Prufrock thinks he's heard the mermaids singing. It concludes that attempting to determine whether that allusion "makes sense" through exegesis is preferred to writing a letter to Eliot to ask him about it. Later collected in the book The Verbal Icon, this essay critiques the "confusion between a poem and its origins." FTP, name this landmark essay of New Criticism, written in 1951 by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, and titled for a certain mistake where readers use external info to try to determine what the author was thinking.   
This essay opens by noting that its subject was recently debated by E.M.W. Tillyard and C.S. Lewis in the collection
"The Intentional Fallacy"