As the title of the essay suggests we will try to discover and explain what the Affective Fallacy is, starting from a simple definition, yet extremely complex because of the many different interpretations it can have depending from what point of view it is analyzed. The affective criticism is considered to be having more than just one branch that it concentrates on, and those are in number of four: the “emotive” (Wimsatt 28) branch, the “theory of empathy, with its transport of the self into the object” (Wimsatt 28), the “physiological form”(Wimsatt 30), and the last and the least developed branch of the affective criticism is the “hallucinative” branch (Wimsatt 30). The branches presented above will be tried to be explained as simple as possible and their connection with the affective fallacy. The brief definition given in “The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry” by William Wimsatt is the following “The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does)” (Wimsatt 21). So this theory starts “by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism”(Wimsatt 21). Putting this into simple words, New Criticisms believed that it is a mistake to judge a poem by the feeling it produces in the reader once it is read, the text must be seen as a self-contained entity without overlooking the formal features. They were questioning what was a text exactly doing to the reader’s mind. So the "affective fallacy" is the misleading way of interpreting texts with respect to the psychological or emotional responses of readers, in the end making a confusion between the text and its results. I will continue by explaining the levels/branches of the affective theory trying to make a clear and relevant connection between them and the “affective fallacy “. The first idea I will approach is the “emot