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	William Empson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		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.
		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 in the collection), as well as the technique of criticism and interpretation that has reckoned it thus.
		Empson notes 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: it requires a mind of astonishing integrity to, in the words of Blake, be of the Devil's cause without knowing it.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/William_Empson (2213 words)

	Constable: Introduction to Critical Essays on William Empson
		William Empson (1906-1984), the most extraordinary British critic of the century, was already famous in his early twenties as a poet and personality.
		Empson's Muddles"[38] has classic status, and is an important document, but it doesn't touch Empson's principles, and despite its insistence on the importance of logic in poetry he gets no closer to a criticism than a sketch and a deprecatory gesture.
		William Empson is one of the closest living readers of poetry" - and the essay is an important stage in the adoption of Empson as corresponding member of the New Critical academy (to which we might say he was elected in his absence).
	mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk /jbcpub/empson.html (6280 words)

	Guardian Unlimited Books \| LRB essay \| William Empson: a most noteworthy poet
		Empson himself thought "the reader should throw himself into the verse, and not do it with 'reserved' English good taste." The best idea was to ham it "like a provincial Shakespeare a hundred years ago".
		Empson described the influence of Eliot as being "perhaps not unlike an east wind", and the expression may be applied to many of his own poems.
		Empson was always sure that the interest of a poem arose from its representation of what passed in the mind of the poet, and the piling up of information about what the poem means is in the end an investigation of the mind that produced it.
	books.guardian.co.uk /lrb/articles/0,6109,332424,00.html (2274 words)

	Michael Dirda
		Empson looked hard at Donne's imagery and Shakespeare's language and simply told you, in a style that was sturdily colloquial and down-to-earth, just what he saw.
		Empson himself was to strenuously defend the importance of the second half of his career, when he funneled his energies into teaching at Sheffield University and attacking literary "neo-Christianity" in the name of reason and Enlightenment humanism (see Milton's God).
		Shortly thereafter began Empson's long involvement with the universities of China, partly as a professor of literature and partly as an advocate of Basic English, a system of language study based on an essential vocabulary of 850 words.
	www.washingtonpost.com /wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/16/AR2005061601254_pf.html (1656 words)

	BF9 William Empson, The Gathering Storm
		Empson’s only further published note about C. Hatakeyama was that she had ‘nothing to do with the Aubade poem’ (7).
		Empson’s poem is ultimately about the ambiguity of beauty and aggression, as well as his own ambiguity toward the Japanese, his ‘pleasure’ in being in their company again and his despair at their ‘tragically false position’ in China and, later, throughout East, North, and Southeast Asia.
		Empson’s longest poem was written during autumn term 1937 while he was with the exiled Chinese universities at Nan-Yueh (Nanyue), while the Japanese Army advanced west and south through the country (see d).
	themargins.net /bib/B/BF/bf09.html (1424 words)

	[minstrels] Missing Dates -- William Empson
		Empson has himself spoken of the 'puzzle interest' of poetry, though one feels that this is in part said with his tongue in his cheek for the sake of shocking readers out of their preconceived ideas.
		Empson himself was teaching in the Far East in the late 1930s and saw more of the upheaval caused by war than poets who seemed to write more directly about it in Europe.
		Also called plurisignation or polysemy, ambiguity arises from what William Empson calls "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." In literary parlance, ambiguity is not a mistake in denotation to be avoided, but a resource of connotation to be exploited.
	www.cs.rice.edu /~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/202.html (810 words)

	LRB \| Adam Phillips : No reason for not asking (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Empson, who believed in the ‘straddling’ of contraries rather than their resolution, who found ambiguity in literature more truthful than conviction, could not avoid unequivocally taking sides when it came to the Fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, and what he took to be the virtual fascism of the Judeo-Christian God.
		Empson, as one might expect, is both more affectionate and ruder in his letters, slightly more charmed by himself than he can let himself be in his public prose; but he never writes as though he has anything to reveal.
		Empson could not have been more ambivalent (and ambiguous) about Eliot, as these letters reveal: Eliot was the instigator of his hated neo-Christian school of criticism, and he had written one of the great poems of the 20th century as a Symbolist.
	www.lrb.co.uk /v28/n15/phil01_.html (2934 words)

	THE EMPSON FAMILY PAGE
		He was William Empson, born in 1906 in Yorkshire, England.
		A few Empsons can be found in almost any country, but my guess is that there are only a few root families.
		If there was to be a single place where the first Empson family originated, it would be in the ancient parish of Snaith in the city of Goole, at the conflux of the rivers Ouse and Dutch near the port city of Hull, Yorkshire, England.
	www.angelfire.com /de/empson/family.html (428 words)

	William Empson - More Information
		Empson was an ethical critic from the outset.
		In his later work, Empson''s growing obsession with the horror of the Crucifixion (as event and symbol), together with his eclectic interest in the mediatory forms of pantheism and vitalism, are all enlisted in support of the campaign against human sacrifice in all its guises, which was already being waged in Seven Types of Ambiguity.
		William Empson provides the most coherent account of Empson''s career to date, and serves also to discredit the appropriation of his name in recent polemic by the conflicting parties of deconstruction and politicized cultural criticism.
	www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk /html/moreinfo.asp?etailerid=19&bookId=536879027 (165 words)

	Special collections
		Sir William Empson, Kt., was born at Howden, Yorkshire, on 27 September 1906 and educated at Winchester College (1920-1925) and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he wrote an early version of his first major work Seven Types of Ambiguity (published 1930).
		On graduating Empson was elected to a research fellowship at his College, but was then deprived of it as a consequence of a breach of the regulations operating in the moral climate of the time.
		Empson was appointed Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield in 1953, a post which he held until his retirement in 1971.
	www.shef.ac.uk /library/special/empson.html (814 words)

	FT.com / Arts & weekend / Books - Impersonal preferences (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Empson’s literary estate prohibited Haffenden from including a poem praising wifely adultery and it remains to be seen whether he will be allowed to deal with Empson’s unorthodox marriage in the second volume of his biography, due later this year.
		Empson appears more as a Man of Letters, conducting scholarly debate about literary matters in the public pages of the Times Literary Supplement and in missives to scholars and writers from George Orwell to Christopher Ricks (the present professor of poetry at Oxford).
		Empson was always combative and fierce, denouncing the attempt to divide authorial intention from criticism as “dirty nonsense” and he didn’t spare those who wrote in admiration.
	www.ft.com /cms/s/1d2976d8-f5e8-11da-b09f-0000779e2340.html (708 words)

	Guardian Unlimited Books \| Review \| The critic as hunting dog
		Empson's ancestors were a rugged and talented crowd.
		Empson's prose style, like Bertrand Russell's, sounds like its origins: it has an impressive briskness and an air of commonsensical confidence; a critic "ought to trust his own nose, like the hunting dog", he wrote in 1950.
		Empson's critical prose is not so far, in tone, from this imperturbable reticence.
	books.guardian.co.uk /review/story/0,12084,1498055,00.html (854 words)

	LRB \| Frank Kermode : The Savage Life (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Empson himself was a pugnacious believer in the relevance of biography to the study of literature.
		As Haffenden remarks, he always sought to ‘situate the work in the context of the life’, and the lives of artists had a special importance because of their status as outsiders, challengers of convention – condemned, in so far as they were doing the work they were born for, to some measure of social isolation.
		In the years covered by this volume Empson did an enormous amount of dignified and sometimes eccentric thinking, and it is a virtue of the book that it gives us a clear view of it.
	www.lrb.co.uk /v27/n10/kerm01_.html (2893 words)

	Empson, William - HighBeam Encyclopedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		EMPSON, WILLIAM [Empson, William] 1906-84, English critic and poet.
		His Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), a study of the meanings of poetry, is a classic of modern literary criticism.
		In Milton's God (1961) Empson engaged in a vehement attack on Puritanism.
	www.encyclopedia.com /doc/1E1-empson-w.html (210 words)

	articles 48
		Volume two – William Empson: Against the Christians –; is scheduled to appear within the next 18 months.
		This will include a detailed account of Empson's activities at the wartime BBC, where he worked closely with his friend George Orwell, and a full picture of life during the Chinese civil war at the close of the 1940s.
		William Empson: Among the Mandarins is published by Oxford University Press.
	www.shef.ac.uk /marcoms/eview/articles-48/empson.html (228 words)

	William Empson (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		William Empson (1906-84) was one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive critical voices, and left a profound mark upon Anglo-American literary culture.
		This book is the first full study of Empson’s literary criticism in its various aspects, taking account of recent developments in critical theory and of Empson’s complex - at times deeply antagonistic - attitude towards those developments.
		Topics include the relations between Empson and Derrida’s approaches to the issue of textual ‘undecidability’, and Empson’s prominent (if unwilling role) in the shaping of English as an academic discourse.
	www.litencyc.com /php/adpage.php?id=788 (140 words)

	Oxford University Press: Selected Letters of William Empson: John Haffenden (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		This edited collection of letters by William Empson (1906-1984), one of the foremost writers and literary critics of the twentieth century, ranges across the entirety of his career.
		Empson is universally credited as the man who "invented" modern literary criticism, so that all of his writings make a signal addition to the canon of his works.
		Empson was perhaps a great, surely a unique, literary critic; these letters reveal his enormous gifts as a writer along with an absolutely intransigent conviction of his own rightness and the invariable wrongness of the scholars and critics with whom he engaged."--William Pritchard, The Washington Times
	www.oup.com /us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/BritishLiterature/20thC/?view=usa&ci=9780199286843 (664 words)

	Hamlet Navigator: Criticism Review: Empson (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Empson says that Hamlet's outbursts against Ophelia were put in "to screw up the paradoxes in the character of Hamlet rather than to affect Ophelia herself" (186).
		In addition to making his points, Empson wanders about quite a bit, discussing other critics, the balcony of the Globe Theater, the Freudian theory of Hamlet's character, and whatnot.
		A Note on William Empson: Sir William Empson (1906-1984), poet and critic, is best known for his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), in which he uses close examination of literary texts to support his assertion that works of literature cannot be confined to moral or historical pigeonholes.
	www.clicknotes.com /hamlet/Empson.html (450 words)

	University Press of Florida: The Complete Poems of William Empson
		Acclaimed as the brilliant author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, published when he was only 24, Empson has been applauded for the dazzling intelligence and emotional passion of his poems.
		Empson’s poems have a range of themes from metaphysics to melancholy, social climbing to political satire, love to loss.
		Sir William Empson was educated at Winchester and Cambridge and taught at Tokyo University, Peking National University, and the University of Sheffield, where he was chair of English literature from 1952 until his retirement in 1971.
	www.upf.com /book.asp?id=HAFFES01 (312 words)

	Empson Sir William - Search Results - MSN Encarta (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Empson, Sir William (1906-1984), English poet and major literary critic of the 1930s.
		Empson was born in Yorkshire and educated at Magdalene...
		Herschel, Sir William (1738-1822), German-born British astronomer, who made many important contributions to astronomy.
	uk.encarta.msn.com /Empson_Sir_William.html (110 words)

	William Empson - Penguin Classics Authors - Penguin Classics
		Sir William Empson was born in Yorkshire in 1906 and educated at Winchester School and Cambridge University, where he studied both mathematics and literature.
		While at university Empson began work on his dissertation that was later published as his first, and perhaps most influential, critical work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).
		Although first recognized as a critic, Empson's own poetry later exercised great technical influence over the group of poets known as 'the Movement'.
	www.penguinclassics.co.uk /nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000010005,00.html (266 words)

	Literary Encyclopedia: William Empson (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		William Empson, poet and critic, was born on 27 September 1906 at Yokefleet Hall in Howden, Yorkshire.
		He was the youngest of five children of Arthur Reginald Empson (landowner and squire) and his wife Laura.
		In 1920 Empson won a scholarship to Winchester College, where he developed his interest in mathematics and science, and also won the college’s English Literature prize.
	www.litencyc.com /php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1427 (509 words)

	Princeton University Senior Theses brief display
		Davis, Jr., William Faber (1950): William Butler Yeats: The Philosopher and the Symbolist.
		Meyer, Anthony Haven (1955): William McKinley and the Annexation of the Philippines.
		Neilson, Frederic William Gebhard (1955): The Province of the Poet: A Study of the Concept of the Role of the Poet as Expressed in the Prose and Poetry of Thomas Stearns Eliot and William Butler Yeats.
	libweb5.princeton.edu /theses/thesesvw.asp?Lname=&Fname=&Submit=Search&Title1=william&department=&Class=&Adviser= (6908 words)

	Constable: 'William Empson', Notes
		Apart from many similarities of background and training, both were interested in the reform of sexual morality, and both came up against the Cambridge establishment for infringements of the traditional codes.
		Lack of biographical data makes it difficult to speculate further, but in so far as Empson's interest in modern science is to be attributed to anyone, Haldane is a major influence.
		Muriel Bradbrook, "The Criticism of William Empson", Scrutiny 2/3 (Dec. 1933), 253-6.
	mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk /jbcpub/empsonnot.html (720 words)

	[minstrels] Let It Go -- William Empson
		After a dazzling start [1], Empson's poetic career seemed to slow down in his later years, as he concentrated on literary analysis [2].
		Empson's book Seven Types Of Ambiguity is probably the single most influential work of criticism since, oh, I don't know, Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (at the very least).
		[Links] Empson's villanelle Missing Dates can be read at poem #202 The commentary at this site includes an analysis of Empson's poetic style, his philosophy and influence on other poets.
	www.cs.rice.edu /~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/233.html (227 words)

	New Statesman - The solitary conversation
		But Empson is rarely graceless, and even when he might have been expected to splutter - after a cleaner found condoms in his college room and reported him, losing him his first academic post and all hope of a career in Cambridge - his poise is admirable.
		This brings out another strength of Empson's smart-casual style, as what felt like a well-turned epigram is revealed as a finely tuned criticism.
		It is, as Haffenden describes another letter from Empson, "a tease, a bribe, a cliffhanger".
	www.newstatesman.com /200605150043 (1056 words)

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