William Empson

Sir William Empson (1906-1984) was an English poet and literary critic, and former head of the English department at the University of Sheffield, sometimes reckoned the greatest English literary critic after Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt and fitting heir to their mode of witty, fiercely heterodox and imaginatively rich criticism. Jonathan Bate has remarked that the three greatest English Literary critics of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are, respectively, Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, "not least because they are the funniest" - and, indeed, in the critical climate of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, when much scholarly activity appears rigorously controlled by doctrinnaire philosophical and critical ideologies, Empson's work is refreshing in its humanity, imagination, wit, and freestyle erudition. The scholar and critic Harold Bloom has suggested that the appropriate apprehension of literary criticism would be one that recognized it as a mode of wisdom literature: Empson's critical stance is, perhaps, best appreciated in this light.

Critical Focus

Empson's critical work focuses largely on pre-modern works in the English literary canon. He was a great critic of Milton (see below), Shakespeare (Essays on Shakespeare), Elizabethan drama (Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume 2, The Drama) and published a monograph on the subject of censorship and the authoritative version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (Faustus and the Censor); but also an important scholar of the metaphysical poets John Donne (Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume 1, Donne and the New Philosophy) and Andrew Marvell. Rather more occasionally, Empson would bring his critical genius to bear on modern writers; Using Biography, for instance, contains papers on Henry Fielding's Tom Jones as well as the poetry of Yeats and Eliot and Joyce's Ulysses.

Related Topics:
Marlowe - Doctor Faustus - John Donne - Andrew Marvell - Henry Fielding - Tom Jones - Yeats - Eliot - Joyce - Ulysses

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