Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8bljj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T05:00:15.555Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - William Empson

from THE NEW CRITICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

A. Walton Litz
Affiliation:
Princeton University, New Jersey
Louis Menand
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
Lawrence Rainey
Affiliation:
University of York
Get access

Summary

Do words make up the majesty

Of man, and his justice

Between the stones and the void?

Geoffrey Hill, ‘Three Baroque Meditations’

William Empson's first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity, begun while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, was published in 1930, when he was twenty-four. It established him at once and permanently as one of the two most brilliant practitioners of what he called verbal analysis, more commonly known as close reading. Only R. P. Blackmur had equal (if differently angled) gifts, and the two men were often grouped together as the critics who, as Stanley Edgar Hyman said, ‘did the work’ of intricate literary exploration, where others had preached or proposed it.

‘Close reading’ is a familiar phrase now, but we need to pause over it for a moment, since its implications have shifted rather drastically over the years, as those of catchphrases often do. I. A. Richards, Empson's teacher at Cambridge, later said his former pupil's ‘minute examinations … raised the standards of ambition and achievement in a difficult and very hazardous art’. The art was reading, and Richards himself had discovered (and reported in Practical Criticism (1929)) how inattentive and prejudiced even apparently serious reading could be. Close reading was rigorous reading, the opposite of loose or distant or offhand appreciation or criticism, and its appetite for detail produced many surprises. It was meant to complement historical knowledge, indeed might be said itself to offer historical knowledge, since the behaviour of words is an aspect of social life. Close reading then became a major instrument of the New Criticism, and the technique gradually came to suggest, in the minds of its detractors and sometimes even in the minds of its proponents, a concentration on the text to the exclusion of all context, as if words in literature had a separate, exclusive, self-contained life.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bradbrook, M. C., ‘Sir William Empson (1906–1984): A Memoir’, Kenyon Review, 7 (1985).Google Scholar
Constable, John (ed.), Critical Essays on William Empson (Brookfield, 1993).Google Scholar
Culler, Jonathan, ‘The Future of Criticism’, in Koelb, Clayton and Lokke, Virgin (eds.), The Current in Criticism: Essays on the Present and Future in Literary Theory (West Lafayette, 1987).Google Scholar
Day, Frank, Sir William Empson: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1984).Google Scholar
de Man, Paul, ‘The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism’, in Blindness and Insight (New York, 1971; rev. edn. Minneapolis, 1983).Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry, ‘The Critic as Clown’, in Against the Grain (London, 1986).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamArgufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Haffenden, John (London, 1987).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamCollected Poems (1949; rpt. London, 1955).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamEmpson on Tennyson’, Tennyson Research Bulletin, 4 (1984).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamEssays on Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Empson, WilliamMilton's God (1961; rpt. Cambridge, 1981).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamPoems (London, 1935).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamSeven Types of Ambiguity (1930; rpt. New York, 1966).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamSome Versions of Pastoral (1935; rpt. Norfolk, Conn., 1960).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamThe Book, Film, and Theatre Reviews of William Empson: Originally Printed in the Cambridge Magazine ‘Granta’, 1927–1929, and Now Collected for the Foundling Press (Turnbridge Wells, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Empson, WilliamThe Gathering Storm (London, 1940).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamThe Royal Beasts (London, 1986).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamThe Strength of Shakespeare's Shrew: Essays, Memories, Reviews (Sheffield, 1996).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamThe Structure of Complex Words (1951; rpt. Ann Arbor, 1967).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamUsing Biography (Cambridge, 1984).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamYeats and Byzantium’, Grand Street, 1 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Empson, WilliamEssays on Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1986).Google Scholar
Empson, WilliamFaustus and the Censor (Oxford, 1987).Google Scholar
Fry, Paul H., William Empson: Prophet against Sacrifice (London, 1991).Google Scholar
Gardner, A. and Gardner, P., The God Approached (Totowa, 1978).Google Scholar
Gardner, Helen, Justin, Mark, and Empson, William, “‘There Is No Penance Due To Innocence”: An Exchange’, New York Review of Books, 29 (1982).Google Scholar
Gill, Roma (ed.), William Empson: The Man and His Work (London, 1974).Google Scholar
Haffenden, John, The Royal Beasts and Other Works (Iowa City, 1988).Google Scholar
Hardy, Barbara, ‘William Empson and Seven Types of Ambiguity’, Sewanee Review, 90 (1982).Google Scholar
Hyman, Stanley Edgar, ‘William Empson and Categorical Criticism’, in The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (1948; rev. edn. New York, 1955).Google Scholar
Kenner, Hugh, ‘Alice in Empsonland’, in Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature (New York, 1958).Google Scholar
Lerner, Laurence, ‘On Ambiguity, Modernism, and Sacred Texts’, in Bell, Vereen and Lerner, Laurence (eds.), On Modern Poetry: Essays Presented to Donald Davie (Nashville, 1988).Google Scholar
McCabe, Colin, ‘The Cambridge Heritage: Richards, Empson and Leavis’, Southern Review, 19 (1986).Google Scholar
Norris, Christopher, ‘Reason, Rhetoric, Theory: Empson and de Man’, Raritan, 5 (1985).Google Scholar
Norris, Christopher, ‘Some Versions of Rhetoric: Empson and de Man’, in Davis, Robert Con and Schleifer, Ronald (eds.), Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale (Norman, Okla., 1985).Google Scholar
Norris, Christopher, ‘The Importance of Empson (II): The Criticism’, Essays in Criticism, 35 (1985).Google Scholar
Norris, Christopher, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London, 1978).Google Scholar
Prichard, R. E., ‘Milton's Satan and Empson's Old Lady’, Notes and Queries, 34 (1987).Google Scholar
Ransom, John Crowe, The New Criticism (New York, 1941).Google Scholar
Sale, R., ‘The Achievement of William Empson’, in Modern Heroism: Essays on D. H. Lawrence, William Empson, and J. R. R. Tolkien (Berkeley, 1973).Google Scholar
Wellek, René, ‘William Empson’, in A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, Volume 5: English Criticism, 1900–1950 (New Haven, 1986).Google Scholar
Wihl, Gary, ‘“Resistance” and “Pregnancy” in Empsonian Metaphor’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 26 (1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wihl, Gary, ‘Empson's Generalized Ambiguities; Essays Presented to A. E. Malloch’, in Wihl, Gary and Williams, David (eds.), Literature and Ethics (Kingston, 1988).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×