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William Empson

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Sir William Empson (1906-1984) was an English poet and literary critic, and former head of the English department at the University of Sheffield, sometimes reckoned 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" - and, indeed, in the critical climate of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, when much scholarly activity appears rigorously controlled by doctrinnaire philosophical and critical ideologies, Empson's work is refreshing in its humanity, imagination, wit, and freestyle erudition. The scholar and critic Harold Bloom has suggested that the appropriate apprehension of literary criticism would be one that recognized it as a mode of wisdom literature: Empson's critical stance is, perhaps, best appreciated in this light.



Education

Empson won a scholarship to study at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1925 and achieved a double first in Mathematics and English in 1929. His supervisor in Mathematics, the father of the mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey, expressed regret at Empson's decision to pursue English rather than Mathematics, a discipline for which Empson showed great talent; and I.A. 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  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 and he was also discovered, in media res, immoderately indulging his concupiscence for a young woman, a fitting symbol of Empson's cheerful disregard for prevailing moral norms as well as of his grand appetite for life. As a result, not only did Empson never receive his M.A. in English, but he had his name stricken from the College records, was prevented from assuming a comfortable fellowship at Cambridge, and, astonishingly, was banished from the city of Cambridge, none of which seems, in retrospect, to the detriment of his subsequent critical output or eminence.

Influence & Importance

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. In his critical work he was particularly influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose own work is largely concerned with the nature of language in its relation to the world and to its speakers. 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, mines 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.

Seven Types of Ambiguity was to have 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 Empson could scarcely be described as an adherent or exponent of such a school or, indeed, of any critical school at all (anymore than Johnson could be). Empson consistently ridiculed, both outrightly in words and implicitly in practice, the doctrine of the Intentional Fallacy formulated by William K. Wimsatt, an influential New Critic, indeed, 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. Empson's distaste for "postmodern" modes of criticism could manifest itself in a dismissive and brusque wit: Sir Frank Kermode remarks that 

     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. The grumpy old man repudiated this notion with his 
     habitual scorn, calling the work of Derrida (or, as he preferred to call 
     him, "Nerrida") "very disgusting"... (Kermode, Pleasure, Change, and the Canon)

Critical Focus

Empson's critical work focuses largely on pre-modern works in the English literary canon. He was a great critic of Milton (see below), Shakespeare (Essays on Shakespeare), Elizabethan drama (Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume 2, The Drama) and published a monograph on the subject of censorship and the authoritative version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (Faustus and the Censor); but also an important scholar of the metaphysical poets John Donne (Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume 1, Donne and the New Philosophy) and Andrew Marvell. Rather more occasionally, Empson would bring his critical genius to bear on modern writers; Using Biography, for instance, contains papers on Henry Fielding's Tom Jones as well as the poetry of Yeats and Eliot and Joyce's Ulysses.

Milton's God

Empson's Milton's God was 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. 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, as it were, be of the Devil's cause without knowing it.

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. Indeed, despite its lack of influence, certain critics view Milton's God as by far the best (that is to say, the most valuable) sustained work of criticism on the poem by a 20th century critic. Indeed Harold Bloom includes it as one of the few critical works worthy of canonical status in his The Western Canon (and the only critical work focusing solely on a single piece of literature). Regardless, Milton's God is an enriching and enjoyable experience of a critic of genius, wit and humanity encountering one of the towering achievements of English narrative poetry.

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. He wrote very few poems and stopped writing poetry almost entirely after 1940. His Complete Poems is 512 pages long, with over 300 pages of notes. In reviewing this work, Frank Kermode commended him as a most noteworthy poet, and chose it as International Book of the Year at the TLS.

Person & 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. He was a Communist deeply sympathetic to the cause of Maoist revolutionaries in China, but was brought up in the cavernous luxury of a rural estate in Yorkshire with all the attendant prerogatives of a member of the landed gentry. He was deeply hostile to Christianity and monotheistic religions quite generally, but took a deep and active interest in Buddhism, even developing some expertise in the evaluation and understanding of Buddhist sculpture. He was a scholar of singular imagination, erudition and insight specializing in the highly traditional domain of pre-modern English literature at the heart of the canon (Shakespeare, Milton, the Metaphysical Poets), but his work is marked by great humour, the indulgence of an eloquent and cavalier dismissiveness (reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's critical bon mots), and an astonishingly rich and varied erudition: hardly marks of the staid, conservative and solemn scholar of popular ridicule and private respect, poring over scholarly minutiae and ignorant of the world at large. He was esteemed the revolutionary forefather of modern literary criticism, but disavowed "theory" altogether and evinced a deep concern for distinctly psychological elements in literature: the emotions of desire and love, the sensibility and intentions of authors. He was often castigated for being brusque and cold, but indulged his sexual desires for men and women freely and without shame, and retained in his prose and criticism, an astonishing sensitivity, respect and interest in human life in all its variety and madness, one might say, a deeply humane sensibility. He was an intellectual and scholar who spent a good portion of his early years inhabiting the persona of an imperial adventurer (more a Richard Francis Burton than a C.S. Lewis). In short, Empson was as much a grand and exuberant personality as a refined, sophisticated, and erudite scholar; 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.


Bibliography

Selected Books on Empson

  • Haffenden, John. William Empson: Vol. 1: Among the Mandarins
  • Norris, Christopher (ed.). William Empson: The Critical Achievement
  • Frank Day. Sir William Empson: An Annotated Bibliography. London: Garland, 1984.

External links

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