William Blake's “The Tyger” as an Expression of the Reader's Futile Search for Authorial Intent
William Blake's “The Tyger” as an Expression of the Reader's Futile Search for Authorial Intent

Summary/Abstract: Reader Response criticism warns against the literary interpreter’s endeavor to uncover the author’s intention in order to reconstruct the original meaning of the literary text. The present essay aims at providing a way of understanding this fundamental critical fallacy from the perspective of reader response criticism by allowing for this critical stance to be emphasized with the help of literature, and more specifically, of William Blake’s famous “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” poem “The Tyger.” In this perspective, the poem can be seen as stressing the potential futile quest for authorial intent in the process of literary interpretation, as well as the consequences of perceiving the literary text as an echo of its creator rather than a reader-reflected image and the interpretative perils associated with an insistent quest on the part of the reader to discover the origin of the text to the detriment of a creative construction of meaning.

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