The critic as poet: Empson's contradictions.(The Complete Poems of William Empson)(Review)

It is now seventeen years since the death of Sir William Empson, university teacher, literary critic, and poet, whose first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), is still his best-known. When he died, Empson had published five critical works, two volumes of poetry, and numerous periodical essays. Posthumously, an astonishing eight further books have appeared, collecting revised versions of the essays but also including substantial quantities of new material, particularly on Renaissance literature. The most recent addition, The Complete Poems of William Empson(1)--edited, like many of its predecessors, by John Haffenden, whose authorized biography of Empson we await as patiently as we can--contains fifty-five pages of introduction, one-hundred-and-seven of text (just over sixty items) and almost three-hundred of notes. There are relatively few additions to the previous Collected Poems (1955) so the book's value depends heavily on its daunting editorial matter. One is bound to wonder why relatively short poems should need this much explication and to fear that they must be willfully obscure. Indeed Empson, who, like Eliot, provided some notes himself, was ready to concede that "No doubt the notes are partly needed through my incompetence in writing." He also felt, however, that a virtue of modern poetry was its resemblance to a crossword puzzle, and that "a sort of puzzle interest is part of the pleasure you are meant to get from the verse."

Such an admission can give hostages to fortune. "Aha," said a colleague of mine years ago, coming upon me when I was poring over the Collected Poems, "I see you're conning Empson--or is he conning you?" It was a malicious question, but also a fair one. That so many of the poems seem worth the difficulty involved in construing them speaks in their favor. Difficulty need not be an affectation, as the example of Eliot showed, but it can be a cover for spurious profundity. Not that Empson was unaware of that; on the contrary, he was very ready to admit that his poems had been overpraised, and that the postwar failure of his inspiration had been a blessing. He told Christopher Ricks in a famous interview, handily reprinted by Haffenden, "It's only because I stopped in time that you still think it's poetry."(2)

"Life" he wrote in a celebrated note to "Bacchus" his most impenetrable poem, "involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis." This concedes, with typical candor, that his literary criticism was a pursuit of the impossible; for if ever anyone might be thought to have tried to solve contradictions by analysis it was he. Yet he was a mass of such contradictions: a Voltairean rationalist with a strong sense of mystery, an anti-Christian with a highly developed capacity for religious awe, a utilitarian with a compassionate heart, a forensic thinker in a casual style, a defender of the use of biography in criticism who was willing to conjecture or even invent episodes in the lives of his subjects, and a man who insisted on the importance of story in literature and harbored a suspicion of symbolism, whose first instinct was nonetheless to look below the literal surface of a work. As he said in another poem, "The contradictions cover such a range." What are we to make of them?

It is best to follow Empson's practice and be biographical awhile. Born in 1906 to a Yorkshire landed gentry family, he was educated at Winchester and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he switched his degree subject from Mathematics to English in 1928, was supervised by I. A. Richards, drafted Seven Types, took a distinguished First, and was elected to a fellowship of his college, from which he was expelled one month later when contraceptives--or, as the college gloriously called them, "sexual engines"--were found in his room. (He wrote a bitter squib about this, "Warning to Undergraduates" advising, "Lock up whatever it appears/Might give a celibate Ideas.") After living as a freelance writer in London for two years, he departed for Tokyo in 1931, where he was to teach at the University of Literature and Science.

This marked the beginning of a long estrangement from England and the English cultural scene, from which he was ...