William Empson

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.

The Queen and I

William Empson and John Haffenden, 26 November 1987

On 27 October 1954 the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the University of Sheffield in order to inaugurate its Jubilee Session. No other reigning sovereign had visited the principal university buildings since King Edward VII opened them in 1905. Six months before the Queen’s visit, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor J.M. Whittaker, put to his recently-appointed Professor of English...

Letter

Jacobean Sodomy

18 August 1983

SIR: ‘That Night at Farnham’ (LRB, 18 August) remarks, speaking of James I: ‘The king and the labouring man both seem to have made the same extraordinary psychological separation between sodomy and what they themselves felt and did.’ Sodomy has been defined, not long before, as ‘sexual relations between man and man (or man and beast)’, and we are told that it was ‘officially’ regarded...

The Ultimate Novel

William Empson, 2 September 1982

So far, I may have given more expression of preference than solid argument. I need now to list the main details throughout the book which prepare the reader for Stephen to accept the Bloom Offer. There is at once a rather quaint obstacle. Most readers of Ulysses do not believe in omens, but Joyce eagerly did; in this he is genuinely like Homer. Four of the characters receive omens, and Joyce would regard these as an assurance that some great event would occur. Stephen on the previous night had a disturbing dream which he increasingly recalls; and the absurd Haines, who was also sleeping in the Martello tower, had a nightmare. He thought himself attacked by a black panther, which he tried to shoot, and Malachi fired some shots to reassure him. Probably Haines had fired real shots too: both young men were accustomed to the use of sporting guns, which Stephen was not. The incident really occurred, and Joyce walked out of the tower for ever, in a drizzle, before dawn. In the novel there is no immediate break, because the author needs to keep the other two characters available. Haines makes occasional reappearances during the day, chiefly as a figure of farce, but usually with a recall of his black panther. Stephen twice very dimly thinks of Bloom as the black panther (Ulysses, 215, 592).

The Ultimate Novel

William Empson, 19 August 1982

It is wonderful how Professor Kenner can keep on about Ulysses, always interesting and relevant and hardly repeating himself at all. His book gives a survey of books about Ulysses, mentioning only two previous ones by himself. He weeds out bad ideas and adds more promising ones, always with acknowledgement to other critics: and it is impressive that he had plenty more material available for the centenary collection, A Starchamber Quiry, just after printing his own book. He puts a new idea of his own into both of these books, and it urgently needs refuting. Stephen, he says (Kenner’s Ulysses, p. 152), is practically blind all through the book; his eyes without his glasses focus eight inches in front of his nose, and he broke them ‘yesterday’. This proves that whenever he claims to see anything he is only remembering what he usually sees. He is thus merely a windbag. (‘Yesterday’ comes on page 546 of the Modern Library 1942 edition. I need to give references because some of my assertions are controversial, but Joyce deliberately made it difficult. Kenner gives a welcome assurance that a definitive edition will soon at last appear.)

Letter

Tarot Triumph

4 September 1980

SIR: It is improbable that, as Michael Dummett appears to say in his books on Tarot (LRB, 4 September), the Tarot pack was used merely for games. Our familiar pack was symbolical to start with; nobody in the Renaissance would invent such a random thing without making it symbolical, or claiming to. And the picture cards of the Tarot are rather aggressively mysterious.

The Terrifying Vrooom: Empsonising

Colin Burrow, 15 July 2021

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...

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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...

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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...

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Wild Bill

Stephen Greenblatt, 20 October 1994

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...

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Cold Feet

Frank Kermode, 22 July 1993

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...

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Buffers

David Trotter, 4 February 1988

‘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...

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What Marlowe would have wanted

Charles Nicholl, 26 November 1987

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...

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On a Chinese Mountain

Frank Kermode, 20 November 1986

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...

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It’s great to change your mind

Christopher Ricks, 7 February 1985

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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