Poet and critic, born in Howden, near Hull, NE England, UK. He studied at Cambridge, and became professor of English literature at Tokyo (19314) and Beijing (19379, 194753), working in the interim with the BBC's Far Eastern Service. From 1953 to 1971 he was professor of English literature at Sheffield University. He wrote several major critical works, notably Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), and his Collected Poems were published in 1955. The Complete Poems of William Empson (ed. John Haffenden) appeared in 2000. He was knighted in 1979.
Sir William Empson (27 September 1906 – 15 April 1984) was an English literary critic and poet, reckoned by some to be the greatest English literary critic after Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt and fitting heir to their mode of witty, fiercely heterodox and imaginatively rich criticism. Jonathan Bate has remarked that the three greatest English Literary critics of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are, respectively, Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, "not least because they are the funniest". Empson has been styled a "critic of genius" by Sir Frank Kermode, although the latter has lamented his lapses into what he regards as willfully perverse readings of certain authors, and the scholar and critic Harold Bloom has confessed that Empson is among a handful of critics who matter most to him, in particular, because of the force and eccentricity (Bloom's expression is "strangeness") of character as revealed in their critical work. The eccentricity or perversity of some of his interpretations, as well as Empson's rather blunt and brusque manner of dealing with criticism of his position, landed him a good deal of criticism both during his life and after his death, leading to his reputation in many circles as a "licensed buffoon".
Education
Empson attended a prep school, where he first discovered his great skill and interest in mathematics.
In 1925, Empson won a scholarship to study at Magdalene College, Cambridge and achieved a double first in Mathematics and English in 1929. Ramsey, expressed regret at Empson's decision to pursue English rather than Mathematics, a discipline for which Empson showed great talent; Richards, the director of studies in English, recalled the genesis of Empson's first major work, Seven Types of Ambiguity, composed when Empson was not yet 22 and published when he was 24:
At about his third visit he brought up the games of interpretation which Laura Riding and Robert Graves had been playing [in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 1927] with the unpunctuated form of 'The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.' Taking the sonnet as a conjuror takes his hat, he produced an endless swarm of lively rabbits from it and ended by 'You could do that with any poetry, couldn't you?' This was a Godsend to a Director of Studies, so I said, 'You'd better go off and do it, hadn't you?'
Despite Empson's great precocity and skill in both English and Mathematics, he was asked to leave Cambridge due to infractions against propriety - a servant discovered prophylactics in his room - a fitting symbol of Empson's cheerful disregard for prevailing moral norms as well as of his grand appetite for life.
Professional career
After his banishment from Cambridge, Empson supported himself for a brief period as a freelance critic and journalist, living in Bloomsbury, London until 1930 when he signed a three-year contract to teach in Japan after his tutor Richards had failed to find him a post teaching in China.
Critical Focus
Empson's critical work focuses largely on pre-modern works in the English literary canon. Rather more occasionally, Empson would bring his critical genius to bear on modern writers; Influence
Empson is today best known for his literary criticism, and in particular his analysis of the use of language in poetical works: his own poetry is arguably undervalued, although it was admired by and influenced English poets in the 1950s. Empson's best known work is the book Seven Types of Ambiguity which, together with Some Versions of Pastoral and The Structure of Complex Words, mine the astonishing riches of linguistic ambiguity in English poetic literature. Empson's studies unearth layer upon layer of irony, suggestion, and argumentation in various literary works - a technique of textual criticism so influential that often Empson's contributions to certain domains of literary scholarship remain significant, though they may no longer be recognized as his. For example, the universal recognition of the difficulty and complexity (indeed, ambiguity) of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 94" ("They that have power...") in light of the preceding and following sonnets is traceable to Empson's sophisticated analysis of the sonnet in Some Versions of Pastoral - a virtuosic display of the riches a critic might unearth from a close reading of poem. Empson's study of "Sonnet 94" goes some way towards explaining the high esteem in which the sonnet is now held (often being reckoned as among the finest sonnets in the collection), as well as the technique of criticism and interpretation that has reckoned it thus.
It would, however, be a mistake to suppose Empson's skill in discovering a rich variety of interpretations of poetic literature amounts to little more than a rather wildly indulged semantic refinement. Empson is as much interested in the human or experiential reality to be discovered in great works of literature: the deep truths communicated, often only by intimation, to the reader. Indeed, it is this commitment to unravelling or articulating the truth in literature that aligns Empson so perfectly with Dr. Johnson and that permits him unusual avenues to explore sociopolitical ideas in literature in a vein very different from contemporary Marxist critics (e.g., Fredric Jameson) or scholars of New Historicism (e.g., Stephen Greenblatt). Thus, for instance, Empson remarks in the first few pages of Some Versions of Pastoral that:
Gray's Elegy is an odd case of poetry with latent political ideas:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear;Already, the heat of Empson's political views might be felt in these lines, though perhaps even here what one feels is nothing more ideological than an ordinary sense of fairness or justice, and he goes on to deliver his political verdict with a subtle, although astute, psychological suggestion:
Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem, and this seems partly because they feel there is a cheat in the implied politics; the 'bourgeois' themselves do not like literature to have too much 'bourgeois ideology.'
Despite the issues grappled with in these passages being overtly political, one hardly feels one is being preached to, rather one senses one is in the hands of a mind as astute politically and as sensitive morally as it is able in interpreting the poetic achievement of Gray. And should one be in doubt of Empson's estimation and understanding of Gray's achievement, in the face of a tradition of worship and study of the poem, Empson routs all political quibbles and ideological concerns with some remarks (in the very next paragraph!) reminiscent of Dr. Johnson in their pained insistence:
And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths;
Perhaps, these remarks deliver Empson from the hands of all who would choose to ignore or deny the existence of something like aesthetic value, from the hands even of Marxist critics; but perhaps, also, they suggest that as critics of the experiential reality of literature, individuals like Dr. Johnson (staunchly conservative and Anglican) and Empson (staunchly radical and atheist) transcend the political categories one supposes even partly describe them.
Despite the complexity of Empson's critical methods and attitude, his work, in particular, Seven Types of Ambiguity, had a significant impact on the New Criticism, a school of criticism which directed particular attention to close reading of texts, among whose adherents may be numbered F.R. Leavis, although, as has been noted, Empson could scarcely be described as an adherent or exponent of such a school or, indeed, of any critical school at all (any more than Johnson could be). Indeed, Empson's distaste for New Criticism could manifest itself in his distinctive dismissive and brusque wit as when he describes New Criticism, ironically referring to it as "the new rigour", as a "campaign to make poetry as dull as possible" (Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume 1, Donne and the New Philosophy, pg. Similarly, both the title and content of one of Empson's volumes of critical papers, Using Biography, show a patent and polemical disregard for the teachings of New Critics as much as for those of Roland Barthes and postmodern literary theories predicated upon, if not merely influenced by, the notion of the Death of the Author, despite the fact that some scholars regard Empson as a progenitor of certain of these currents of criticism, which vexed Empson enough to comment:
Now and again somebody like Christopher Norris may, in a pious moment, attempt to "recuperate" a particularly brilliant old-style reputation by claiming its owner as a New New Critic avant la lettre - Empson in this case, now to be thought of as having, in his "great theoretical summa," The Structure of Complex Words, anticipated deconstruction. (Kermode, Pleasure, Change, and the Canon)
Literary Criticism II: Milton's God
Empson's Milton's God is often described as a sustained attack on Christianity and defence of Milton's attempt to 'justify God's ways to man' in Paradise Lost. Empson argues that precisely the inconsistencies and complexities adduced by critics as evidence of the poem's badness, in fact, function in quite the opposite manner: what the poem brings out is the difficulty faced by anyone in encountering and submitting to the will of God and, indeed, the great clash between the authority of such a deity and the determinate desires and needs of human beings. (Milton's God (1965), p13)
Empson notes that it is precisely Milton's great sensitivity and faithfulness to the Scriptures, in spite of their apparent madness, that generates such a controversial picture of God: it requires a mind of astonishing integrity to, in the words of Blake, be of the Devil's cause without knowing it. 11)
The tendency in surveys of Empson's achievement in Milton's God is, depending on one's politics, to marvel or bristle at the audacious perversity of his central thesis - though something of the same perversity was tidied up and reinterpreted in Stanley Fish's much lauded work on Milton (see, e.g., Surprised by Sin); this unfortunate tendency eclipses many of Empson's great insights and his grand intelligence, humanity and humour in reading the poem, and ignores the significance of the work as a presentation of one of the few instances of an effort to immunize the aesthetic achievements of the poem from those available only to individuals with certain doctrinaire religious commitments (see also the work of Balachandra Rajan).
Although perhaps not as influential as, say, Fish's work, Milton's God remains of great significance to any critically-minded reader of Paradise Lost and it is a far more human presentation of the reasons for, and the character of, the hold the poem has upon us. Empson portrays the work as the product of a man of astonishingly powerful and imaginative sensibilities and great intellect who had invested much of himself in the poem.
Poetry
Empson's poetry is clever, learned, dry, aethereal and technically virtuosic - not wholly dissimilar to his critical work: his high regard for the metaphysical poet John Donne is to be seen in many places within his work, tempered with his appreciation of Buddhist thinking, and his occasional tendency to satire. Character
Empson was a charismatic personality, variously described as gruff, scornful, brusque, cold, and of immoderate appetites (sex and alcohol being the most obvious), partly because he was also a roundly paradoxical figure. and it is precisely this great reckless energy for life, this willingness to throw his entire self into the interpretation and criticism of literature, that informs his critical work and serves to renew in the common reader a sense of the wholly and inalienably human investment in canonical literature: a sense of how Milton or Shakespeare or Donne can matter deeply to all and any of us.
Quotes
From "They That Have Power" in Some Versions of Pastoral:
(regarding Sonnet 94): If this was Shakespeare's only surviving work, it would still be clear, supposing one knew about the other Elizabethans, that it involves somehow their feelings about the Machiavellian, the wicked plotter who is exciting and civilized and somehow right about life;
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