English Language · English

Fill in the blank numbered (41): 'Traditional criticism would say we should ask the author, and if he/she is dead, we should read biographies, diaries, or letters, until we can guess what the author might have intended. ____________ (41), however, disagrees. If language is not ours to process, but always pre-exists us and comes from outside, and if poems issue from language, not from the ideas which are language's cause rather than its effect, there is no final answer to the question of what any particular example of language in action ultimately means.'