William Empson provocatively dubbed John Donne a ‘space man’ in his second major essay on the Renaissance poet, establishing science fiction credentials for a writer who, Empson maintained, was ‘interested in getting to another planet much as the kids are nowadays’ (1993a, 78). ‘Donne the Space Man’ appeared in John Crowe Ransom's Kenyon Review in the summer of 1957, a few months before the launch of Sputnik 1 on 4 October. Empson's argument was that Donne ‘brought the idea [of space travel] into practically all his best love-poems, with the sentiment which it still carries of adventurous freedom’, and that ‘coming soon after Copernicus and Bruno’ this was a defiance of Christian doctrine, since it meant ‘denying the uniqueness of Jesus’ (78–79). If there can be life on other planets, there must be a separate Jesus for each world, and Donne's references to the holiness of his beloved, coupled with imagery of new lands and spheres, are subversive. A reading that failed to take Donne's interest in speculative astronomy seriously was, according to Empson, one that risked allowing his love poems to appear merely smutty, so that establishing Donne's heresy and his respect for female interlocutors became one and the same endeavour. The use of the term ‘space man’ by the twentieth-century critic was a radical humanist gesture, asserting a major preoccupation of science fiction – life on other worlds – against a literary critical establishment that he found loaded with oppressive Christian values.

Empson set out to imitate Donne in his own early verses (see Haffenden, 2005, 358–70), testing the new sciences of the early twentieth century to see what resources they might offer the adventurous lover. These experiments were suffused with two other profound influences, one acknowledged and the other tacit. Opening his contribution to a festschrift for T. S. Eliot, published in 1948, Empson demurred at trying ‘to judge or define’ Eliot's achievement: ‘I feel, like most other verse writers of my generation, that I do not know for certain how much of my own mind he invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him.