Long ago, as an undergraduate, I was required to adopt this approach. I was against it, even at the age of nineteen. I would tell my tutor that I wanted to write about a particular poem, not its reputation. Surely, it should be taken for granted that whatever I thought about the poem was an idea of the poem. I was not sufficiently informed or confident at that stage to make a good argument. I was easily swatted aside as a naïve empiricist. The only existence a literary work could have was in the minds of those who had read it – or, it should have been added, of those who had heard about it. My
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