It had different ancient shapes, as in the works on atomism by Democritus, or in Epicurus's materialism. Much later, in Latin, the materialism of mentality is the theme of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura , and in the generation immediately prior to Shelley's, the foremost English authority on Lucretius was a learned editor, Gilbert Wakefield, who was imprisoned for seditious writing in 1798 simultaneously with his publisher Joseph Johnson. Meanings, like documents, escape the narrow little limits of personhood and personal control. Meanings, like documents, escape authorial control, and then they belittle the category of authorial control itself. Even if it is a useful tool for a professional editor who must decide among alternative readings somehow, and whose product will be marketed in an author-centered marketplace, the concept of authorial intention shrinks, under an adequate frame of historical reference, to one among many blackbirds in a very noisy tree.
Meanings are larger than private heads.
And they are larger than our interests, our desires, or our need. Last modified October 1997.