Word: empson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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COLLECTED POEMS OF WILLIAM EMPSON (113 pp.)-Harcourt, Brace...
...like differential calculus and other forms of honest brainwork, has a permanent beauty worth a closer look. Of all living writers, none has done more as a critic to keep this distinction clear or more as a poet to illustrate it than bush-bearded, 42-year-old Englishman William Empson, who now lives by choice in Peiping. For years Empson's work has been admired by people who would put their minds on it, and either ignored or jeered at by a greater number who gave it a fast superficial reading. The first U.S. publication of his collected poems...
...Empson's poems came out of hard thinking about poetry. Twenty years ago as a student at Magdalene College, Cambridge, Empson turned on his studies a now legendary power of concentration. In a university famous for mathematics he got a "first" in the subject, then a "starred first" in English...
Shoulder the Sky. In six weeks, in an assigned paper, Empson wrote the first draft of Seven Types of Ambiguity, which became a classic of modern literary criticism. His tutor, Semanticist I. A. Richards, had been exploring the wide range of meanings that various minds can find in the simplest verse. Empson took up the subject and exhausted it. Some readers complained Poet-Mathematician Empson had "read things into poetry that weren't there," erecting double or multiple meanings into a poetic principle...
...while teaching in Tokyo and Peiping, Empson began to put together a poetry of his own. Some of his early verses now seem overstrained, jammed with more allusions than anything this side of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. But he was probably the first man anywhere to shoulder the brand-new sky of the Cambridge physicists and astronomers and jostle intelligible poetry...