While they do not deny the presence of an authorial intention, they deny the importance or usefulness of looking for such an intention as part of analyzing a work. To insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's performance. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that the poem must work on its own, independent of any meeting or not meeting of an authorial intention which a reader would have no immediate way of knowing about in the first place. Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work.
Poems belong neither to the author nor the critic.
It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge. Criticism must shed its concern with the genetic cause of the poem and focus on the poem itself.