William Empson (1906–1984)

I should have read this sixty years ago. I bought a copy thirty years ago. Now I finally read it. Better late than never?

Sixty years ago, I entered college, and its English department was a bastion of what’s still referred to as the New Criticism, a century after that movement began. This book was already a classic text and was on the syllabus for many courses. Thirty years ago, I revisited the campus and picked up a copy at the bookstore there. Now at last I can say I’ve read it.

My show more reading experience was mixed. It took me a while to get into it. The first chapter was daunting in that, for several pages, it was hard to know what the author was getting at. I supposed that was only to be expected in a book with the word “ambiguity” in its title. But that is not the kind of ambiguity Empson meant.

Finally, after what Empson concedes “has grown too long and too portentous,” he begins dealing with specific examples from the full range of English-language poetry, from Chaucer to Empson’s contemporary, T. S. Eliot. The author’s insights enriched my understanding, even though they were couched in the port-and-pipe tones of a college common room after dinner.

Not all of this has aged well. Empson’s repeated reference to “feminine” as an undesirable trait in a poet, for instance. I’m not even sure that it wasn't risible at the time.

For those looking for a summary of the seven types, there are plenty of videos online that cover them better than I can. I’ll mention one takeaway that stayed with me: the need to recalibrate one’s reading to account for the time a poem was written. A reader can’t read an Elizabethan sonnet in the same way as a lyric from the Romantic era, nor would either approach help one appreciate Dryden or Pope.

Despite being a slow read, I’m glad I finally got around to this. Although the New Criticism is no longer new, and certainly not the last word, this remains a valuable work. show less

I've had this on my shelves for years, but never had time when I was a student to read it all the way through. I'm glad I did take the opportunity now: it's worth following Empson's argument through from beginning to end.
It is very much a young man's book: sometimes he gets quite arrogant and dogmatic, but he usually catches himself in time and turns it into a joke. Sometimes there's a footnote added in the second edition where he castigates himself for jumping to the wrong conclusion first show more time round.
The analysis itself is often exciting and eye-opening, and there's an interesting background discussion going on about the nature of poetry and the role of criticism, especially of analysis of the quasi-scientific type Empson is doing. Do we reduce a poem to nothing if we calculate all the permutations of things the words could mean or suggest? Do we just formalise the things we already have in our minds when we read the poem subjectively?
Although he uses a lot of scientific images himself, Empson isn't really suggesting that a "scientific" approach to language is the key to understanding poetry. But he is arguing that we can often get a better idea of how the different ideas in a poem work together if we have a proper look at the language. At least some of his examples seem to bear this out, and point out quite surprising things in the language that I, at least, had never spotted. And his technique is presented so clearly that this is a book that you can read quite happily without having a background in literary theory: it should be perfectly accessible to anyone who reads English poetry for pleasure. show less

Empson's basic contention is that Marlowe's Doctor Faustus was heavily censored, that the A-text is the direct result of the censorship, and that the B-text is a compromised stage-friendly version with copious amounts of non-Marlovian (I love that word) verse added to complete the running-time.

All well and good, and hardly controversial. But Empson decides to go further, and to uncover what was censored, performing a sort of forensic literature analysis. And this is where things get show more interesting.

The short-short version is this: Mephistopholes is not a devil, but a Middle Spirit. He acts as a broker between Faust and the actual devils, who are trapped in hell. Now, Middle Spirits live a few thousand years and include beings such as the Greek gods: they have no souls, and therefore die "like beasts" unless they can obtain the soul of a human. The Faustian pack suddenly becomes less one-sided: Faust, having no interest in the afterlife (in fact wanting to die like a beast), sells his soul to Mephistopholes directly: Faust gets fame, knowledge, and enjoyment (but not possession!) of the world's riches; Mephistoheles gets a soul, and therefore a shot at paradise when the End Times come.

This adds new meaning to Faust's last words ("Ah, Mephistopholes!") and clears up the many many contradictions in Mephistopholes' theological lectures. Empson asserts that the existence of Middle Spirits was heretical under Calvinist doctrine, and that the rejection of God/Heaven must be punished, just like in the old movie codes (which may still exist, judging by the fifth and final season of a popular drug-themed TV show which shall not be named).

The actual proof, however, involves some reaching. I'm not sure I'm convinced, but I do like to entertain the theory.


A fifth star added for the academic smack-talking. Empson really gets his digs in where he can, making this a surprisingly entertaining read. show less

I got off to a very rocky start with this book — beginning with the first sentence!

"An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful."

Skipping over "in ordinary speech" for the moment, I was not aware that ambiguity was "as a rule witty or deceitful." This sentence sent me to two different dictionaries and ultimately — when I was at the library the other day anyway — to the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. None of these sources show more contradicted my presumed definition of "ambiguous" or "ambiguity," but interestingly and as an aside, the OED actually quotes this very sentence in its section of historical usage. For the sake of brevity, let me quote the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:

ambiguous: having more than one meaning; open to different interpretations.

Nowhere in any of my sources — the third being Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (2008) — were the words "witty" or "deceitful" to be found.

While Empson's presumably working definition invokes "ordinary speech," his book deals almost exclusively with an analysis of poetry — hardly anybody's concept of ordinary speech. But let us forget about this unfortunate phraseology because it merely detracts from what turns out to be a very useful and important book.

Empson has conceived of seven main types of literary ambiguity along with innumerable subtypes and variations, all of which he illustrates with detailed exegesis of poems, especially from Shakespeare, John Donne and John Dryden. Some of Empson's types are easier to absorb than others, but his explanation of individual poems are highly enlightening and worth the investment of time to understand and overlook his sometimes obscure language.

For example, the first type is so complicated that a complete definition is difficult to sum up and state succinctly, but a single line from Shakespeare will serve to illustrate the idea that "a word or a grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once":

      Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang
                              —Sonnet LXXII

". . . because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved in knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallized out of the likeness of a forest, and colored with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the gray walls colored like the skies of winter . . . all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry."

How powerful is that?

Here is another example, the third type of ambiguity, in which two ideas "can be given in one word simultaneously":

                                  Delilah,
      That specious monster, my accomplished snare.
                        —Milton, Samson Agonistes, line 230

The operative word here is specious, which in its original definition meant "beautiful," and only later acquired the meaning of "having deceptive attraction or allure." If you know both meanings, you feel the hidden power of "That specious monster."

Empson refers to these words with double meanings as puns, and technically perhaps they are. Shakespeare's poetry — both sonnets and plays — is full of them, as Empson demonstrates again and again. He directly says that most of the ambiguities he has considered seem beautiful to him — again, not our customary notion of a pun.

The many ambiguities seen in poem after poem make us conscious of the tensions raised by the contradictions if we can see them. The more prominent the contradiction, the greater the tension.

Some critics have argued that Empson's ambiguities are not that at all but merely demonstrate the many creative uses of language in poetry. I see in his analysis something akin to hermeneutics, which originated among Biblical scholars in identifying different levels of interpretation and later made more generally familiar in literary criticism by Norbert Fry. However, one wishes to look at it, Empson's analysis opens us up to a deep understanding of the complexity of poetry. show less