Three Hitherto Unpublished Poems
William Empson, 17 August 1989
I remember to have wept with a sense of the unnecessary. ‘Do you think me so ungenerous that I need to be deceived about this? Do you think me such a fool that these tactics will deceive me?’ Now, on the contrary, I shall speak with reverence of liars.
What you must save for is the Golden Bowl, Cast anthropoid, beaten to delicacy; One depends for that, though hollow, upon...