Post-Structuralism In Roland Barthes's The Death Of The Author

Roland Barthes’ essay the Death of the Author uses the literary critical school of Post-structuralism and rejects all notions of authorial intent in order to place the text in a wider context thus enabling the reader to develop a more structured approach when trying to understand the meaning of the content of the text. Barthes’ theory, when applied to the poem I wandered lonely as a cloud, rejects the common perception that the content of the text must be personal to Wordsworth with all elements of the text created by him and instead focuses on encouraging the reader to form a detailed and unbiased interpretation of the text by removing the author and their background, ‘‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author’’ (Barthes). This essay will discuss the key points of Roland Barthes’ post-structural essay the Death of the Author and how this theory can be applied to William Wordsworth’s poem I wandered lonely as a cloud.
In order to read I wandered lonely as a cloud from a post-structuralism perspective one has to remove William Wordsworth’s identity and historical background and anything that may have influenced his decision to write about such specific content as its meaning is too condensed if the reader puts limitations on the text and searches for meaning by analysing it in the context of Wordsworth’s life rather than placing the text in a universal setting; instead of focusing on the speculation that Wordsworth wrote the poem in response to