Note: I misread the above, leaving out "without." So what follows is really a response to "I can't imagine anyone buying a Frank Llyod Wright house knowing in detail Wright's sordid history."

Me: "How about if the real estate agent didn't reveal the horrid truth to the purchaser? Imagine enjoying the beauty of the house you're living in for twenty or thirty years, then finding out a bad person designed it!"

"I would only say that your moral awareness is stronger than your aesthetic awareness. But it doesn't have anything to do with what I'm talking about, which is what a poem means as a poem. You may give a poem a moral meaning because of who composed it rather than because of its explicit content, but that meaning would be what I now call exnotia--something that colors one's experience of a poem but has nothing to do with what the poem is aesthetically.

"Complex topic not that amenable to Internet discussions but, hey, thanks, everybody, for pushing me until I erupted this morning to spill four new Grummanisms: "denotia" (what a poem denotes): "connotia," (what a poem connotes); "symbnotia," (what a poem can be reasonably said to symbolize) and "exnotia" (what aesthetically irrelevant meanings a poem picks up because of such matters as who composed it, where it was composed, etc.)"

I can't say I love "symbnotia" but can't think of anything better at the moment.