William Empson (1906–1984)

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1. Ezra Pound

   Author of Selected Poems, ABC of Reading, Guide to Kulchur (New Directions Paperbook, Ndp257)

2. Geoffrey Hill

   Author of Geoffrey Hill's New and Collected Poems: 1952-1992, The Triumph of Love, Collected Poems

3. Northrop Frye

   Author of Anatomy of Criticism, Fearful Symmetry, Fables Of Identity: Studies In Poetic Mythology

4. I. A. Richards

   Author of Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism: A Study Of Literary Judgment

5. Walter Benjamin

   Author of Illuminations, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Walter Benjamin), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927-1934 (Walter Benjamin)

6. M. H. Abrams

   Author of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature

7. Erich Auerbach

   Author of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Dante : Poet of the Secular World

8. Cleanth Brooks

   Author of The Well Wrought Urn

9. Frank Kermode

   Author of Shakespeare's language, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (with a New Epilogue), The Age of Shakespeare

10. Harold Bloom

    Author of The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry

11. Edmund Wilson

    Author of Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature

12. Hugh Kenner

    Author of The Pound Era, A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers

13. Wallace Stevens

    Author of Collected poems, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

14. Terry Eagleton

    Author of Literary Theory: An Introduction, William Shakespeare (Rereading Literature)

15. Wayne C. Booth

    Author of The Rhetoric of Fiction

16. Roland Barthes

    Author of S/Z: An Essay, Sade, Fourier, Loyola

17. Jacques Derrida

    Author of Of Grammatology

18. Ian Watt

    Author of The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding

19. George Steiner

    Author of After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman

20. T. S. Eliot

    Author of Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral, On Poetry and Poets