He shows how various editors of Milton's poems have used criteria such as English and Latin syntax, a variety of sources, Milton's known attitudes, Milton's use of the same words in others of his works and so on in order in order to arrive at a final meaning for the problematic sonnet. Fish criticizes this approach because it overlooks and devalues the reader's interpretive work, assuming that the text is self-sufficient, that the meaning is somehow in the text itself, whereas, for Fish, the meaning arises out of the reader's interpretive acts. It is quite possible for two different readers to arrive at two very different readings of the same text. In such a case, says Fish, they might be tempted to complain that they couldn't possibly have been reading the same text. And they would be right, because 'each of us would be reading the poem he had made'.
Fish rejects the text's independence as a repository of meaning.
He emphasizes that meaning is not inherent waiting to be 'tranmsitted' to more or less passive 'receivers'. Rather, the reader's active construction of meaning is so central that it might even be more accurate to speak of writing than of reading. In the understanding of texts, there is no possibility of an 'author-centred' or somehow 'objective' interpretation. The reader will always necessarily bring to the text whatever pre-understanding she has. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there will rarely be as many meanings as there are readers.