Passage A:

To read a poem as though it had descended from nowhere - as though its images and preoccupations bore no relation to the life of the person who made it - is to impoverish the act of interpretation. The circumstances of a work's composition are not extraneous to its meaning; they are among the constraints that a responsible reading must honor. When a lyric's central metaphor answers precisely to a documented crisis in its author's life, the correspondence is rarely accidental, and to ignore it is not to achieve purity but to license fantasy. Biographical knowledge, far from imprisoning the reader in the author's intentions, does the opposite: it disciplines interpretation, ruling out the anachronistic and the merely ingenious. Consider how often a reader unacquainted with a poet's circumstances will seize upon a resonance the poet could not have intended, mistaking the accidents of modern usage for the writer's design. A critic ignorant of the idioms, allusions, and private references available to a writer will read into a text concerns it could not have held. This is not to say that a poem means only what its author consciously intended; meaning outruns intention. But intention, and the life that shapes it, mark the boundaries within which such surplus may responsibly be sought. The biographer's labor thus serves the reader - not by dissolving the poem into the life, but by supplying the context that keeps interpretation answerable to something outside the interpreter's own ingenuity.

Passage B:

A poem is made of words, not of the events in its author's life, and it is to the words that criticism owes its allegiance. The temptation to explain a work by appeal to biography is understandable but corrupting, for it substitutes the person for the poem and treats the finished artifact as a symptom of its maker's experience rather than a structure to be understood on its own terms. The relevant question is never what the author felt but what the words, arranged as they are, accomplish. Biographical information, moreover, is peculiarly seductive precisely because it seems to settle disputes the text leaves open: confronted with an ambiguity the poem sustains, the critic reaches for the life to resolve it, and in doing so silences the very complexity that constitutes the work's achievement. What the poem holds in suspension, biography collapses. The critic who knows too much about the life is tempted to read the poem as a private diary rather than as an object made to be read by strangers, and the poem suffers accordingly. This is not a denial that authors have lives, or that those lives leave traces; it is a claim about relevance. Even where a biographical fact and a textual feature coincide, the coincidence explains nothing about the poem as poem - about why these words, in this order, produce the effect they do. To read well is to attend to that effect, and biography, however interesting in itself, contributes nothing to it.