The heart of standing is you cannot fly

Frank Kermode

  • The Complete Poems of William Empson edited by John Haffenden
    Allen Lane, 410 pp, £30.00, April 2000, ISBN 0 7139 9287 5

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 himself thought ‘the reader should throw himself into the verse, and not do it with “reserved” English good taste.’ The best idea was to ham it ‘like a provincial Shakespeare a hundred years ago’. According to Naomi Lewis this resulted in his ‘presenting his love poems in the sardonic tones of a 17th-century New England elder directing the trial of a witch’. Haffenden describes Empson’s as ‘a patrician voice, with a slightly sardonic timbre’, which seems a fair description of his everyday tones, and so is G.S. Fraser’s – ‘an odd, sad, snarly voice’. Of his poetry reading John Wain said he rendered some passages ‘like a Neapolitan stevedore, laryngitically croaking others’. In private sitting-rooms he used a quieter tone, ‘though the curious angularity of rhythm’, which some like and some do not, was still present.

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