Furtherreading
Other info : Career | Bibliography
Critical focus
Empson's critical work focuses largely on early and pre-modern works in the English literary canon. He was a significant scholar of Milton (see below), Shakespeare (Essays on Shakespeare), and Elizabethan drama (Essays on Renaissance Literature, Volume 2: The Drama). He published a monograph,Faustus and the Censor, on the subject of censorship and the authoritative version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. He was also an important scholar of themetaphysical poets John Donne (Essays on Renaissance Literature, Volume 1: Donne and the New Philosophy) and Andrew Marvell.
Occasionally, Empson brought his critical genius to bear on modern writers; Using Biography, for instance, contains papers on Henry Fielding's Tom Jones as well as the poetry of William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and Joyce's Ulysses.
Literary criticismEmpson was styled a "critic of genius" by critic Frank Kermode, who qualified his praise by identifying willfully perverse readings of certain authors; andHarold Bloom has stated that Empson is among a handful of critics 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 own phrase).
Empson is today best known for his literary criticism, and in particular his analysis of the use of language in poetical works: his own poetry is arguably undervalued, although it was admired by and influenced English poets in the 1950s. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was an acquaintance at Cambridge, but Empson consistently denied any previous or direct influence on his work.Empson's best known work is the book Seven Types of Ambiguity which, together with Some Versions of Pastoral and The Structure of Complex Words, mine the astonishing riches of linguistic ambiguity in English poetic literature. Empson's studies unearth layer upon layer of irony, suggestion, and argumentation in various literary works—a technique of textual criticism so influential that often Empson's contributions to certain domains of literary scholarship remain significant, though they may no longer be recognized as his. The universal recognition of the difficulty and complexity (indeed, ambiguity) of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 94" ("They that have power..."), for instance, is traceable to Empson's analysis in Some Versions of Pastoral—a virtuosic display of the riches a critic might unearth from a close reading of a poem. Empson's study of "Sonnet 94" goes some way towards explaining the high esteem in which the sonnet is now held (often being reckoned as among the finest sonnets), as well as the technique of criticism and interpretation that has thus reckoned it.
Empson's technique of teasing a rich variety of interpretations from poetic literature does not, however, exhaustively characterize his critical practice. He is much interested in the human or experiential reality to be discovered in great works of literature as is manifest, for instance, in his discussion of the fortunes of the notion of Proletarian literature in Some Versions of Pastoral. Indeed, it is this commitment to unravelling or articulating the experiential truth or reality in literature that aligns Empson so perfectly with Dr. Johnson and that permits him unusual avenues to explore sociopolitical ideas in literature in a vein very different from contemporary Marxist critics (e.g., Fredric Jameson) or scholars of New Historicism (e.g., Stephen Greenblatt). Thus, for instance, Empson remarks in the first few pages of Some Versions of Pastoral that:
Gray's Elegy is an odd case of poetry with latent political ideas:
Full many a gem of purest ray sereneThe dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear;Full many a flower is born to blush unseenAnd waste its sweetness on the desert air.What this means, as the context makes clear, is that eighteenth century England had no scholarship 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 of melancholy claims that the poet understands the considerations opposed to aristocracy, though he judges against them; the truism of the reflections in the churchyard, the universality and impersonality this gives to the style, claim as if by comparison that we ought to accept the injustice of society as we do the inevitability of death.Empson goes on to deliver his political verdict with a psychological suggestion:
Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem, and this seems partly because they feel there is a cheat in the implied politics; the 'bourgeois' themselves do not like literature to have too much 'bourgeois ideology.'
Should one be in doubt of Empson's estimation and understanding of Gray's achievement, in the face of a tradition of canonization and study of the poem, Empson routs all political quibbles and ideological concerns with some remarks reminiscent of Dr. Johnson in their pained insistence:
And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity. A statement of this is certainly non-political because it is true in any society, and yet nearly all the great poetic statements of it are in a way 'bourgeois', like this one; they suggest to readers, though they do not say, that for the poor man things cannot be improved even in degree.
Despite the complexity of Empson's critical methods and attitude, his work, in particular, Seven Types of Ambiguity, had a significant impact on the New Criticism, a school of criticism which directed particular attention to close reading of texts, among whose adherents may be numbered F. R. Leavis, although, as has been noted, Empson could 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 the Intentional Fallacy formulated by William K. Wimsatt, an influential New Critic. Indeed, Empson's distaste for New Criticism could manifest itself in a distinctively dismissive and brusque wit as when he describes New Criticism (which he ironically labels "the new rigour") as a "campaign to make poetry as dull as possible" (Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume 1, Donne and the New Philosophy, p. 122). Similarly, both the title and the 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 much as for those of Roland Barthes and postmodern literary theories predicated upon, 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 of these currents of criticism, which vexed Empson. As Frank Kermode stated:
Now and again somebody like Christopher Norris may, in a pious moment, attempt to "recuperate" a particularly brilliant old-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 "great theoretical summa," The Structure of Complex Words, anticipated deconstruction. The grumpy old man repudiated this notion with his habitual scorn, calling the work of Derrida (or, as he preferred to call him, "Nerrida") "very disgusting"... (Kermode, Pleasure, Change, and the Canon)
Milton's GodEmpson's Milton's God is often described as a sustained attack on Christianity and defence of Milton's attempt to 'justify God's ways to man' in Paradise Lost. Empson argues that precisely the inconsistencies and complexities adduced by critics as evidence of the poem's badness, in fact, function in quite the opposite manner: what the poem brings out is the difficulty faced by anyone in encountering and submitting to the will of God and, indeed, the great clash between the authority of such a deity and the determinate desires and needs of human beings.
...the poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions, which ought to be clear in your mind when you are feeling its power. I think it horrible and wonderful; I regard it as like Aztec or Benin sculpture, or to come nearer home the novels of Kafka, and am rather suspicious of any critic who claims not to feel anything so obvious. (Milton's God (1965), p. 13)
Empson claims that it is precisely Milton's great sensitivity and faithfulness to the Scriptures, in spite of their apparent madness, that generates such a controversial picture of God: thus Empson reckons that it requires a mind of astonishing integrity to, in the words ofBlake, be of the Devil's party without knowing it.
[Milton] is struggling to make his God appear less wicked, as he tells us he will at the start (l. 25), and does succeed in making him noticeably less wicked than the traditional Christian one; though, after all, owing to his loyalty to the sacred text and the penetration with which he make its story real to us, his modern critics still feel, in a puzzled way, that there is something badly wrong about it all. That this searching goes on in Paradise Lost, I submit, is the chief source of its fascination and poignancy... (Milton's God (1965), p. 11)
The tendency in surveys of Empson's achievement in Milton's God is, depending on one's politics, to marvel or bristle at the audacious perversity of his central thesis—though something of the same perversity was tidied-up and reinterpreted in Stanley Fish's much lauded work on Milton (e.g., Surprised by Sin). This eclipses some of Empson's insights and his intelligence, humanity and humour in reading the poem, and ignores the significance of the work as one of the few efforts to immunize the aesthetic achievements of the poem from its theological or more widely religious achievements (see also the work of Balachandra Rajan).
Although perhaps not as influential in academic circles as, for example, Fish's work, Milton's God remains of great significance to any critically minded reader of Paradise Lost as a presentation of some reasons for the centrality of the work in the English literary canon. Empson portrays the work as the product of a poet of astonishingly powerful and imaginative sensibilities and great intellect who had invested much of himself in the poem. Despite its lack of influence, certain critics view Milton's God as by far the best (that is to say, the most valuable) sustained work of criticism on the poem by a 20th-century critic. Harold Bloom includes it as one of the few critical works worthy of canonical status in his The Western Canon (and the only critical work focusing solely on a single piece of literature).
