Word: empson
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Ever since Shakespeare wrote the sonnet They That Have Power to Hurt, people thought they knew what it meant. But in 1935 a young British critic named William Empson told them they did not. The sonnet, he announced, contains 4,096 possible meanings. He then presented some of them by showing the sonnet's ambiguous use of words, metaphors and punctuation, by finding half-buried references to Machiavelli and King Solomon and even prophetic hints of Oscar Wilde. Literary criticism has not been the same since...
...Empson became the grand panjandrum of the New Criticism, which claimed that a work of literature could best be understood by a detailed analysis of its language. Other critics have had profounder things to say about literature than Empson, but in line-by-line analysis no one can match him. One of the most labyrinthian explications of a poem on record is his 26-page analysis of Andrew Marvell's 72-line Thoughts in a Garden, in which, among other things, he lists every time the word green is used in Marvell's poetry. Green, he argued, meant...
Ambiguities out of a Hat. Empson brought a mathematician's mind to literature. He studied mathematics for four years at Cambridge before he switched to English literature, found he could tick off literary analogies as effortlessly as the multiplication tables. Before long, his tutor recalled, Empson was plucking meanings from poems "like rabbits out of a hat." He was still only 24 when he published Seven Types of Ambiguity, which examined microscopically not only Shakespeare, but also much of English poetry, uncovering layer after layer of ambiguity in works that had been considered perfectly clear. Not even the simplest...
...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...
...stumbled toward catastrophe, poetry blundered deeper into obscurity and ambiguity, into the talented but precious minutiae of Wallace Stevens and William Empson, whose poems often suggest esthetic scrimshaw, a cathedral carved in a cherry pit. Poetry became a world unto itself, a self-sealing vacuum in which poets engaged in a conspiracy of mutual approval, safe from the embarrassing questions of the bewildered public, safe from what Poet Stefan George called "the indignity of being understood...