·ideas

Critical focus

Empson'scritical work focuses largely on early and pre-modern works in the Englishliterary canon. He was a significant scholar of Milton (see below), Shakespeare(Essays on Shakespeare) and Elizabethan drama (Essays on RenaissanceLiterature, Volume 2: The Drama). He published a monograph, Faustus and theCensor, on the subject of censorship and the authoritative version of Marlowe'sDoctor Faustus. He was also an important scholar of the metaphysical poets JohnDonne (Essays on Renaissance Literature, Volume 1: Donne and the NewPhilosophy) and Andrew Marvell.

Occasionally Empson brought his critical genius to bear onmodern writers; Using Biography, for instance, contains papers on Henry Fielding'sTom Jones as well as the poems of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and Joyce'sUlysses.

Literary criticism

Empson was styled a "critic of genius" by FrankKermode, who qualified his praise by identifying willfully perverse readings ofcertain authors. Harold Bloom has stated that Empson is among a handful ofcritics who matter most to him because of their force and eccentricity.Empson's bluntness led to controversy both during his life and after his death,and a reputation in part also as a "licensed buffoon" (Empson's ownphrase).

Style, method and influence

Empson is today best known for his literary criticism andin particular his analysis of the use of language in poetical works: his ownpoems are arguably undervalued, although they were admired by and influencedEnglish poets in the 1950s. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was anacquaintance at Cambridge, but Empson consistently denied any previous or directinfluence on his work. Empson's best-known work is the book Seven Types ofAmbiguity, which, together with Some Versions of Pastoral and The Structure ofComplex Words, mines the astonishing riches of linguistic ambiguity in Englishpoetic literature. Empson's studies unearth layer upon layer of irony,suggestion and argumentation in various literary works, applying a technique oftextual criticism so influential that often Empson's contributions to certaindomains of literary scholarship remain significant, though they may no longerbe recognized as his. The universal recognition of the difficulty andcomplexity (indeed, ambiguity) of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 94"("They that have power ..."), for instance, is traceable to Empson'sanalysis in Some Versions of Pastoral. Empson's study of "Sonnet 94"goes some way towards explaining the high esteem in which the sonnet is nowheld (often being reckoned as among the finest sonnets), as well as thetechnique of criticism and interpretation that has thus reckoned it.

Empson'stechnique of teasing a rich variety of interpretations from poetic literaturedoes not, however, exhaustively characterize his critical practice. He was alsovery interested in the human or experiential reality to be discovered in greatworks of literature, as is manifest, for instance, in his discussion of thefortunes of the notion of proletarian literature in Some Versions of Pastoral.His commitment to unravelling or articulating the experiential truth or realityin literature permitted him unusual avenues to explore sociopolitical ideas inliterature in a vein very different from contemporary Marxist critics orscholars of New Historicism. Thus, for instance, Empson remarks in the firstfew pages of Some Versions of Pastoral that:

Gray's Elegyis an odd case of poetry with latent political ideas:

Full many agem of purest ray serene

The dark,unfathomed caves of ocean bear;

Full many aflower is born to blush unseen

And wasteits sweetness on the desert air.

What thismeans, as the context makes clear, is that eighteenth century England had noscholarship system or carrière ouverte aux talents. This is stated as pathetic,but the reader is put into a mood in which one would not try to alter it. ...By comparing the social arrangement to Nature he makes it seem inevitable,which it was not, and gives it a dignity which was undeserved. ... The tone ofmelancholy claims that the poet understands the considerations opposed toaristocracy, though he judges against them; the truism of the reflections inthe churchyard, the universality and impersonality this gives to the style,claim as if by comparison that we ought to accept the injustice of society aswe do the inevitability of death.

Empson goeson to deliver his political verdict with a psychological suggestion:

Many people,without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massivecalm of the poem, and this seems partly because they feel there is a cheat inthe implied politics; the "bourgeois" themselves do not likeliterature to have too much "bourgeois ideology".

Empson alsomade remarks reminiscent of Dr Samuel Johnson in their pained insistence:

And yet whatis said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that anyimprovement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even ina fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but befelt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value mustaccept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to beprepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity. A statement ofthis is certainly non-political because it is true in any society, and yetnearly all the great poetic statements of it are in a way"bourgeois", like this one; they suggest to readers, though they donot say, that for the poor man things cannot be improved even in degree.

Despite thecomplexity of Empson's critical methods and attitude, his work, in particularSeven Types of Ambiguity, had a significant impact on the New Criticism, aschool of criticism that directed particular attention to close reading oftexts, among whose adherents may be numbered F. R. Leavis, although Empsoncould scarcely be described as an adherent or exponent of such a school or,indeed, of any critical school at all. Indeed, Empson consistently ridiculed,both outrightly in words and implicitly in practice, the doctrine of theintentional fallacy formulated by William K. Wimsatt, an influential NewCritic. Indeed, Empson's distaste for New Criticism could manifest itself in adistinctively dismissive and brusque wit, as when he described New Criticism(which he ironically labelled "the new rigour") as a "campaignto make poetry as dull as possible" (Essays on Renaissance Literature,Volume 1: Donne and the New Philosophy, p. 122). Similarly, both the title andthe content of one of Empson's volumes of critical papers, Using Biography,show a patent and polemical disregard for the teachings of New Critics as muchas for those of Roland Barthes and postmodern literary theories predicatedupon, if not merely influenced by, the notion of the Death of the Author,despite the fact that some scholars regard Empson as a progenitor of certain ofthese currents of criticism, which vexed Empson. As Frank Kermode stated:

Now and again somebody like Christopher Norris may, in apious moment, attempt to "recuperate" a particularly brilliantold-style reputation by claiming its owner as a New New Critic avant la lettre- Empson in this case, now to be thought of as having, in his "greattheoretical summa," The Structure of Complex Words, anticipateddeconstruction. The grumpy old man repudiated this notion with his habitualscorn, calling the work of Derrida (or, as he preferred to call him,"Nerrida") "very disgusting"(Kermode, Pleasure, Change, andthe Canon)

Milton's God

Empson'sMilton's God is often described as a sustained attack on Christianity and adefence of Milton's attempt to 'justify God's ways to man' in Paradise Lost.Empson argues that precisely the inconsistencies and complexities adduced bycritics as evidence of the poem's badness in fact function in quite theopposite manner. What the poem brings out is the difficulty faced by anyone inencountering and submitting to the will of God and, indeed, the great clashbetween the authority of such a deity and the determinate desires and needs ofhuman beings:

the poem isnot good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions, whichought to be clear in your mind when you are feeling its power. I think ithorrible and wonderful; I regard it as like Aztec or Benin sculpture, or tocome nearer home the novels of Kafka, and am rather suspicious of any criticwho claims not to feel anything so obvious. (Milton's God (1965), p. 13)

Empsonclaims that it is precisely Milton's great sensitivity and faithfulness to theScriptures, in spite of their apparent madness, that generates such acontroversial picture of God. Empson reckons that it requires a mind ofastonishing integrity to, in the words of Blake, be of the Devil's partywithout knowing it:

[Milton] isstruggling to make his God appear less wicked, as he tells us he will at thestart (l. 25), and does succeed in making him noticeably less wicked than thetraditional Christian one; though, after all, owing to his loyalty to thesacred text and the penetration with which he make its story real to us, hismodern critics still feel, in a puzzled way, that there is something badlywrong about it all. That this searching goes on in Paradise Lost, I submit, isthe chief source of its fascination and poignancy... (Milton's God (1965), p.11)

Empsonportrays Paradise Lost as the product of a poet of astonishingly powerful andimaginative sensibilities and great intellect who had invested much of himselfin the poem.

Despite itslack of influence, certain critics view Milton's God as by far the bestsustained work of criticism on the poem by a 20th-century critic. Harold Bloomincludes it as one of the few critical works worthy of canonical status in hisThe Western Canon (where it is also the only critical work focusing solely on asingle piece of literature).