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“... Catholic and an activist for social justice whose life until that point – studying the poetry of William Empson, training for the priesthood, setting up Church Action on Poverty to campaign for a minimum wage and mastering Labour’s housing brief in opposition – hadn’t obviously pointed him towards the energy portfolio in government. Today he is no ...”

“... inaugural lecture as Warton Professor, he might consider re-using that of his excellent essay on Empson in Against the Grain, ‘The Critic as Clown’. Through the Eighties a succession of possible messiahs appeared in place of Althusser – first Benjamin, later Habermas in The Function of Criticism (1984), to some extent Bakhtin in ...”

“... without charge). In 1918, returned from the dead, he married Nancy Nicholson (daughter of William Nicholson the painter, sister to Ben Nicholson and herself a skilful illustrator and designer), with whom he had three children by 1922, although it was never quite clear how keen the strongly feminist Nancy was on being married to him. Meanwhile he was ...”

“... was still unnerving to have one’s private life put on display. A year earlier Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had published Journey to the Frontier, a joint Life of Julian Bell and John Cornford, who died in Spain a few months before Bell. It is the product of a more decorous school of biography: they didn’t seek out information that people weren’t ...”

“... knows that the real essentialists are the scholars and critics of the previous generation (Empson?) and that Marxists and their friends are all for a joyous anarchy, transgression, gaiety transfiguring all that dread. Yet Greenblatt, having with whatever degree of self-awareness accomplished the fundamental shift from determinism to a random ...”

“... in mind as marking the relation between Yeats’s poems and Ulysses? The second matter arises from William Empson’s work on Ulysses. I’ve never seen his interpretation discussed.* He takes the book to be a story about a young man, Stephen Dedalus, who was saved from violence, crime or craziness by having a quiet affair with an older woman, Molly ...”

“... futile and meaningless – that man is ‘a finite piece of reasonable misery’, in the words of William Drummond of Hawthornden, a good poet who was also a great plagiarist, and a great seeker of shelter in books – but that an absolute order might be felt for, or invented. That order was eventually discovered in the teachings of Christianity. When he ...”

“... piety which Palmer also espoused at his most exuberant. The Ancients got all that from William Blake, about whose feet they gathered in a spirit of veneration. Without obvious irony they called his cramped and shabby lodgings ‘The House of the Interpreter’, after the spiritual authority in The Pilgrim’s Progress; and of them all Palmer seems ...”

“... no memory of, on one particular evening I came to blows with Bottrall.You were pretty cool about Empson too in your ‘Poetry Chronicle’.I remain cool about Empson, apart from three or four poems which are uncharacteristic. I think he’s just a clever clogs. A show-off. Most of it doesn’t give me any pleasure at ...”

“... to others. Sutherland recounts how, at a party in 1961, ‘Stephen had become so infuriated’ by William Empson’s ‘aspersions against Encounter’s American backers that he threw a glass of wine at him’ (Empson cheerfully remarked that another drink stain on his clothes would hardly show). Was this ...”

“... that it seemed to have always been there. The Country and the City (1973) has none of the magic of Empson’s book on the pastoral; it relies on a measured tread where Empson goes in for startling arabesques; yet it reaches out for one of the grand permanences of European thought, highlighting a central dialectic both in ...”

“... Criticism’ is to incite an understanding which is partial in both senses. The strength of William Empson’s criticism has always been its commitment to principles and not to theory, and this strength is clear in one of his apophthegms, itself a principle about principles: ‘Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions which can’t ...”

“... does one end and the other begin? One of the most authentic moments occurs in 94, a sonnet which Empson computed to have 4096 ‘possible movements of thought’ (he was also a mathematician so he must be right). The poem could be addressed to the Machiavellian Prince Hal: They that have power to hurt, and will do none, That do not do the thing they most do ...”

“... in London. Contact with Hale eventually resumed. In 1927 he told a friend (a fellow American, William Force Stead): ‘I had a letter from a girl in Boston this morning whom I have not seen or heard from for years and years. It brought back something to me that I had not known for a long time.’ In October 1930 she came to tea in London. Vivien liked her ...”