Word: empson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Empson's masterpiece is a long theological poem, Bacchus, which he finished in China in 1939. Strictly constructed and packed with systematic puns, it has the mass and polish and concealed energy of a jacketed turbine. The divinity in question is not only the releasing god of drunkenness and wit but God Himself, protean and powerful...
...this poem, as to others, Empson has provided notes to help the reader of good will. He says of the passage: "[The god is here] Noah or Neptune managing the sea. The point is to get puns for both violent disorder and building a structure . . . Cope-coping-stone and to manage, groynes-breakwaters, the meet of Gothic arches, the sex of the horses. The same kind of control is needed inside your head, a place also round and not well known (miner-"minor"), and it requires chiefly a clarifying connection with the outside world, e.g., by the arches...
...Dismayed. Empson's paradox is that he preaches Oriental passivity in the most dynamic sort of Western verse. This is symbolic of Empson's life in China, where he shared the hardships of the Japanese war with his students, trekking overland from Peiping to distant, mountainous Yunnan province, a distance of some 1,800 miles. Books were lost in the flight, so Empson gave a whole course in the English metaphysical poets from memory, reconstructing John Donne's songs and sonnets by substituting lines of his own for lines he had forgotten...
During the war, Empson worked in England for the BBC; he married, and then returned to Peking National University, where he intends to stay. Last summer, however, he taught at Kenyon College, in Ohio-a gentle, wiry little man who, as one friend put it, "wandered around in a cloud of black beard, talking animatedly to himself...
...When Empson read it aloud, his Bacchus swept his hearers away with its sonority and music, having an effect that Poet John Crowe Ransom likened to "the blazing beauty of fireworks." But what most impressed them was the detachment with which this prodigious man regarded a notoriously threatened and self-conscious world. The last poem in his new book was a meditation on world culture...