William Empson, who died in 1984, was one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. His books include Seven Types of Ambiguity, Some Versions of Pastoral, The Structure of Complex Words and Milton’s God. His Complete Poems are available from Penguin. He wrote in the LRB on Ulysses, his fellow critics I.A. Richards and Frank Kermode, Elizabethan spirits, teaching in the Far East in the 1930s, and the speed of fairy flight in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The LRB has carried several pieces on Empson’s work by Frank Kermode, as well as essays by Christopher Ricks and Colin Burrow. John Henry Jones’s Diary gives a memorable account of life with the Empsons in Hampstead.
Reading an Empson essay is like being taken for a drive by an eccentric uncle in a terrifyingly powerful old banger. There are disturbing stains on the upholstery and an alarming whiff of whisky in the...
Replying in 1934 to a Japanese poet who had asked for advice about writing ‘modern’ poetry, William Empson recommended ‘verse with a variety of sorts of feeling in it...
Empson has been dead these 16 years, and although his voice was often recorded it now seems difficult to describe it. John Haffenden says he had one voice for poetry and another for prose. Empson...
It would be easy for a reader who was encountering Empson for the first time to wonder what on earth this critical performance was about and why these ragged relics – the second part of a...
William Empson maintained that there was a right and a wrong moment to bring theory into the business of intelligent reading, and that the professionals chose the wrong one, but he could not do...
‘I thought I had best begin by expressing some old-buffer prejudices in general,’ Empson told the British Society of Aesthetics in 1961: ‘but now I will turn to English...
The best, perhaps, has survived, but a great deal of Elizabethan drama has not. The number of titles mentioned in contemporary documents – the account books of the impresario Philip...
The Royal Beasts contains works of Empson’s previously unpublished or published long ago and very obscurely. There is a short play, an unfinished novel, a ballet scenario and a batch of...
Of books darkened by being posthumous, this one of Empson’s, Using Biography, is among the most illuminatingly vital. Every page is alive with his incomparable mind, his great heart, and...
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