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“... a riskiness about it that we don’t associate with the New Criticism. Unless of course we count William Empson as belonging to the school despite himself (he hated its axiomatic claim that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’) since his early ...”

“... In 1940, after she’d gained the admiration of Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, and had had nearly thirty of her poems published in literary journals or book collections, Elizabeth Bishop, then 28, admitted in a letter to Moore: ‘I scarcely know why I persist at all. It is really fantastic to place so much on the fact that I have written a half-dozen phrases that I can still bear to reread without too much embarrassment ...”

“... about art, theatre and history; about Blake, Ruskin, Faraday, Milton, Constable and Purcell. William Empson, who studied English with him at Cambridge in the late 1920s, and with whom he started the magazine Experiment, thought of Jennings as ‘quite unaffectedly a leader’ who ‘was rather unconscious of other people, except as an ...”

“... obscurity in Porter’s later work is revealingly glossed in a New Statesman piece he wrote about William Empson. Porter’s own poetic strategy is expounded along with Empson’s: ‘people were not used to poems which began so laconically: “and now she cleans her teeth into the lake.” But the originality of the ...”

“... Gray’s poetry that has something to do with his instinct for Latin. The ‘massive calm’ that William Empson found and resented in the Elegy – and that might well have soothed Wolfe and his comrades – surely derives from this. Empson heard in Gray’s famous lines on the unfulfilled potential of the humble ...”

“... will be politically radical, any more than the common people themselves are spontaneously radical. William Empson revealed the ‘progressive’ possibilities of as well-bred a genre as pastoral. Neither is it true, as romantic populists like Auerbach and Bakhtin tend to believe, that everyday life is somehow more ‘real’ than courts and country ...”

“... Likenesses at the Royal West of England Academy. Many poets and writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag ...”

“... Each appears here in a representative figure: the bibliographer Fredson Bowers and the interpreter William K. Wimsatt. McKenzie singles them out for tactical purposes – that is to say, in order to place each of them at the centre of his double-focused critique of the traditional theory of texts. ‘There is nothing outside of the text.’ That well-known ...”

“... lonely schoolboy from Christ’s Hospital. Through his study of the scientific work, Levere joins William Empson among others in defending the coherence of Coleridge and his metaphysics. Coleridge’s vision of a ‘dynamic’ German philosophy, pitted against Anglo-Gallic reductionism; his flirtation with chemistry ‘to improve his stock of ...”

“... try to adapt herself to them’. Their house became a meeting place for talented undergraduates. William Empson was one visitor (he asked Haldane for help after he was thrown out of Cambridge when condoms were found in his room). Haldane and Charlotte divorced in 1945, and he married one of his PhD students, Helen Spurway. Dronamraju devotes a chapter ...”

“... devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’ William Blake wrote these words near the end of the 18th century and set going the idea that Paradise Lost, Milton’s epic justifying the ways of God to men, had a twofold force: an orthodox ostensible meaning and a profoundly unorthodox unconscious meaning, the ...”

“... He is more a latterday Metaphysical. Behind his most representative poems I hear the voice of William Empson. ‘Funnelweb’, probably the finest poem he has written, is as hard a nut to crack as many an Empson poem, though it stops short of both the bafflement and authority of ‘Bacchus’. His affection for the ...”

“... of Christianity, both among intellectuals and more widely, in the 1940s and early 1950s. When William Empson returned to Britain in 1953, having spent his teaching career up to that point in the Far East and the US, he professed to be shocked by the predominance of ‘neo-Christian’ perspectives in the teaching of English literature. The ...”

“... anti-intentionalists are really intentionalists without realising it, and has an odd skirmish with William Empson, whom he takes, mistakenly, as an exemplary anti-intentionalist, which could only be true if you were including his unintended intentions. However, the climax of the argument comes, or ought to come, in the chapter headed ‘Does a literary ...”

“... the Middle Ages, Auerbach says, and finds its most ambitious and extensive elaboration in Dante. William Empson has a whole dazzling paragraph on George Herbert’s line ‘Man stole the fruit but I must climb the tree,’ including these sentences: He [Christ] climbs the tree to repay what was stolen, as if he was putting the apple back; but the ...”