“... 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 ...”

“... should say ‘witted’ criticism. Should he continue in this direction, he will soon sound like William Empson, the Keeper of the Seven Seals in this area, a great critic posing as a terrible poet, who was apparently content to commit lines such as ‘Project her no projectiles, plan nor man it.’ It is bewildering that Hill, once so richly ...”

“... Audenesque pastoral airmen, urban gay camp, Shakespearean aristocrats-in-the-woods and what William Empson called the child-as-swain: TWO SHEPHERDS: We love the country, that’s why we’re handsome, it’s love love love love love. We only quarrel over sheep. We’re terribly natural, aren’t we? Well, is the sky blue? What did you expect, a ...”

“... poetry,’ Hamilton writes, which sets the stakes high, to be sure; and when we learn that William once tried to write up a poem from one of her journal entries and found himself stuck, Hamilton is not slow to draw the anti-aesthetic moral: ‘Clearly there is an integrity or propriety to Dorothy’s literalism that resists poetic translation.’ Her ...”

“... Milton drew on works by the Swiss theologian Johannes Wolleb and the English puritan divine William Ames. De Doctrina Christiana follows Wolleb and Ames in dozens of ways, from its Ramist structure to many of its definitions, although Milton does not acknowledge these borrowings. This occlusion need not be thought of as dishonest. Silently borrowed ...”

“... known enemies, especially F.L. Lucas; and many undergraduates, especially women. The undergraduate William Empson, who did not go to lectures on principle, attended the morning-after discussions of them. They seem not to have been a spectacular success. Some judged them too recondite, and others were unable to hear much of discourses delivered in a low ...”

“... Among Oxford scholars the fashion was to deplore these latest developments, on the grounds – as William Empson scornfully put it – that one shouldn’t prune down too far toward the roots of beauty for fear of destroying the plant. Fifty years on and Robson, very much an ‘Oxford’ voice, can look to Richards as a mainstay of critical good sense ...”

“... from the psychological dimension?’Giorgio Agamben, The End of the PoemThere is a moment​ in William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity when he decides to linger in Macbeth’s mind. The future killer is trying to convince himself that murder might be not so bad a crime (for the criminal) if he could just get it over with. This is about as unreal ...”

“... VII, the first Tudor king, had died aged 52, in his privy chamber at Richmond Palace. But Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, though rarely straying from the king’s side in his last disease-ridden and paranoid years, had been away from court and nobody had bothered to tell them. More than that: a faction of the late king’s advisers had decided to keep his ...”

“... in the prose. ‘The range and grasp of his mind is always evident in the present book,’ William Empson wrote in a review of the essay collection The Dyer’s Hand, quoted by Davenport-Hines, ‘but it strikes me that his mind is increasingly hampered, and that the resulting thoughts are often wrong ... he twitters like a curate in ...”

“... and abandoning the prejudices of his provincial Unitarian upbringing in St Louis. In a 1972 essay, William Empson rather ingeniously suggested that Eliot’s anti-semitism was in fact a transfer onto Jews of his dislike of his family religion, but that he just couldn’t bring himself to write: ‘And the Unitarian squats on the ...”

“... response to his more portentous gestures, a version of the self-protective rhetorical device that William Empson diagnosed as ‘pseudo-parody to disarm criticism’. ‘I don’t think I am less happy than most. But the word Happy has ceased for years to mean anything I seek to be. How’s that for a pompous mouthful?’ Heartless about his own ...”

“... of the latter occasions have long been in the public domain, not least because the young William Empson occasionally attended (he did so, with characteristic Empsonian brio, without actually going to any of the lectures). The lectures were eventually published, in an exemplary edition by Ronald Schuchard, in 1993, and since Schuchard had access ...”

“... heavenly cricket team. Greene on cinema, Osbert Lancaster on art, Elizabeth Bowen on theatre, William Empson on travel ... and Evelyn Waugh on books. Waugh’s lambasting of the milquetoast Left sounds like mere common sense now, but by making truthfulness of prose his first criterion he achieved a permanently refreshing generosity of taste. With ...”