The Intentional Fallacy, according to Wimsatt, derives from “confusion between the poem and its origins” ( Verbal Icon 21) – essentially, it occurs when a critic puts too much emphasis on personal, biographical, or what he calls “external” information when analyzing a work (they note that this is essentially the same as the “Genetic fallacy” in philosophical studies 21). A view of literature based on its putative emotional effects will always be vulnerable to mystification and subjectivity Wimsatt singles out the belletristic tradition exemplified by critics such as Arthur Quiller-Couch and George Saintsbury as an instance of a type of criticism that relies on subjective impressions and is thus unrepeatable and unreliable. For Wimsatt, the fallacy led to a number of potential errors, most of them related to emotional relativism. This definition of the fallacy, if strictly followed, touches on or wholly includes nearly all of the major modes of literary criticism, from Ovid's docere delictendo (to teach by delighting), Aristotle's catharsis, and Longinus's concept of 'transport' to late-nineteenth century belles-lettres and the contemporary Chicago Critics. Wimsatt used the term to refer to all forms of criticism that understood a text's effect upon the reader to be the primary route to analyzing the importance and success of that text. First defined in an article published in The Sewanee Review in 1949, the concept of an affective fallacy was most clearly articulated in The Verbal Icon, Wimsatt's collection of essays published in 1954.

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