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“... to honour the poor and the departed, but we don’t have to be so humble and defeated about it. William Empson pointed out long ago the creepy quietism of the poem’s sentiment: it is ‘stated as pathetic’, he said, ‘but the reader is put into a mood in which one would not try to alter it.’ Harrison repeatedly borrows the stanza form and rhyme ...”

“... events in Dylan Thomas’s body are related pantheistically to more massive ones outside’, as William Empson decided in 1947. The poet’s body is the land in Chronic too. The ailing body, dying, as we are all dying; the body no longer young; the infected body, living with (for example) HIV, pervade Powell’s books. But new here is the omnipresent ...”

“... set, and needs these books as dressing. Apparently, a group gathered at the Statesman to honour William Empson. For surviving. A sane voice in a fox-crazy world. There were lengthy speeches, drinks, more speeches, more drinks, and a presentation. But when the moment came around, and they looked for the great man, the bearded sage, it had to be admitted ...”

“... 1950. The later works in both their Collected Poems bear the marks of triumph over silence. Even William Empson – a man Gascoyne records as being ‘extraordinarily unprepossessing’ and whose poetry was a ‘bore’ – largely ceased to publish verse after The Gathering Storm (1940). And sadly he never returned to it. One by-product of the storms ...”

“... is that a responsible and formally coherent account, much influenced by authorities as diverse as William Empson and Julian Pitt-Rivers, seems not to be powerful. I hope this can be said without being taken as part of some (Tom) Pauline conspiracy of Irish bull merchants. It is not at first sight a ‘political’ problem, since one of the things that ...”

“... narrative finds Orwell working for the BBC during the Second World War, in the cubicle next to William Empson. Orwell immediately propositioned Empson’s partner, Hetta Crouse, but to no effect. ‘It was the smell, Empson grimly implied.’ Sutherland reports that Hetta and ...”

“... a very strange poet. The usual account of this strangeness, until fairly recently, was to say as William Empson did in the introduction to the selection of Coleridge’s poems he edited with David Pirie: ‘Coleridge wrote only a few very good poems.’ Debate has turned essentially on the question of which those poems were. Defending the edition he was ...”

“... sin? Unless of course she was not entirely innocent. After all, she was not physically forced ... William Empson, Donaldson notes, found St Augustine’s insinuation ‘caddish’, which it probably is. But one can fail to be a gentleman and still make sense, and even get onto the church calendar. Why does Lucretia kill herself? This is in part a ...”

“... have contributed to a volume entitled The English World, for all its slap-up production, its William Morris end-papers and no end of gorgeous illustrations. For a start, could you have a more catchpenny title? The word ‘world’ here means everything and nothing, and it is left entirely to the reader to give it definition. I am being unfair, for many ...”

“... to act on it.The scene from Macbeth is the prime example of the creation of atmosphere provided by William Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Empson had his suspicions about atmosphere, because its effects appear to exceed the patterns of sound and sense he proposed to investigate in his book. But he wasn’t going to ...”

“... was something of a pioneer work in the vein of Graves’s contemporaries, I.A. Richards and William Empson, but the pair’s dismantling and reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ shows their peculiar sort of wilfulness running mad, however much they were on to what later became the ambiguity ...”

“... of meaning and reference. ‘At least one reader’ turns out, fifty pages later, to have been William Empson. Brown refers, with irrefutable accuracy, to ‘an American woman actress’, ‘Infidelity’ seems to have some occult meaning for him, because he alludes, in a passage about ‘The Dead’, to Gabriel’s ‘fascination with his wife’s ...”

“... later version ‘richer, more complex’, like Jack Stillinger and Zachary Leader; or decide, with William Empson, that it has been mangled ‘for reasons of conscience’? It is not easy to make out what Coleridge thought about the unity of the self, but surely having a sense of it is consistent with occasional changes of mind. His practice suggests that ...”

“... density, without volume, without spread. We can find passages of this kind of brilliance in William Empson; but they are linked to dramatic and psychological occasions, and irreducibly thematic compared with Barthes’s performances. Barthes is theorising language and narrative, theorising a certain linguistic form as narrative, and yet he is ...”

“... and renewal in postwar Toronto. Such criticism represented everything that the briskly rationalist William Empson, who detested religiose aesthetics like those of Eliot, found most nauseating. It was enamoured of charts and diagrams, polarities and sub-divisions, with that odd combination of rigorous categories and occult contents which one associates ...”