Word: empson
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...MODERN POET edited by Ian Hamilton. 200 pages. Horizon. $5.95. An Anglo-American anthology of criticism and poetry from a little magazine, The Review, including interviews with William Empson and Robert Lowell...
...literary critics, most of them would be lost without pop-psych, though not all go the distance with Britain's William Empson in his analysis of Alice in Wonderland. Alice, noted Empson, fell "through a deep hole into the secrets of Mother Earth," where she found herself "in a long, low hall, part of the palace of the Queen of Hearts (a neat touch)," from which the only way out was "through a hole frighteningly too small." In short, Alice re-enacted the birth trauma...
...Empson has written only sparsely since. He taught in Japan, then in China, until the Communists drove him out in 1952, and he returned to Britain to teach at the red brick Sheffield University. He wrote two more books of criticism and some poetry, which, as might be expected, is filled with calculated ambiguities...
Poetry Without Pleasure. But Empson's latest work, Milton's God, a vast retreat from the crisp analysis of his earlier writing, is less literary criticism than a diatribe against Christianity. Empson fears that literary criticism has fallen into the hands of T. S. Eliot and the "neo-Christian movement." which judges all literature from a Christian viewpoint. Empson finds Satan a more likable character than God in Paradise Lost. Milton's God is "astonishingly like Uncle Joe Stalin" down to "flashes of joviality" and "bad temper," writes Empson. He tortures angels and mankind...
...Empson's endless explications are often ingenious, just as often capricious. "Unexplained beauty always arouses an interest in me," Empson once irreverently wrote, "a sense that this could be a good place to scratch." By close analysis, Empson has washed away many misreadings of poetry; by showing how varied and inventive poets are, he has often made them more exciting. But he may also frighten off readers who translate his lesson as: if you think you understand a poem, there is something wrong with you−or the poem. As a result, many a reader has felt that poetry...