!Affective Fallacy Affective Fallacy is a doctrine of evaluation of a poem that claims for objective criticism in which the critic does not describe the effects of a work upon himself, but concentrates upon the analysis of the specific attributes and devices of the work by which such effects are achieved. This approach came after modification of the earlier definition which said that the error of evaluating a poem by its effects – especially its emotional effects – upon the reader is known as Affective Fallacy. It was thus defined by W K Wimsatt Jr and Monroe C Beardsley in an essay published in 1946. This fallacy makes “the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear” to such an extent that criticism “ends in impressionism and relativism”. It was clearly an attempt to separate the appreciation and evaluation of a poem from its emotional and other effects on the reader. This definition an approach demanded some modification because it was severely criticized on the ground that a work of literature which leaves the reader unresponsive and impassive is not experienced as literature at all. After the doctrine was criticized, M C Beardsley modified the earlier claim. He admitted that “it does not appear that critical evaluation can be done at all except in relation to certain types of effect that aesthetic objects have upon their perceivers.”