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.

Education

Empson won a scholarship to study at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1925 and achieved firsts in both Mathematics and English in 1929. His supervisor in Mathematics, the father of the mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey, expressed regret at Empson's decision to pursue English rather than Mathematics, a discipline for which Empson showed great talent; and I.A. Richards, the director of studies in English, recalled the genesis of Empson's first major work, Seven Types of Ambiguity, composed when Empson was not yet 22 and published when he was 24:

Related Topics:
Magdalene College, Cambridge - Frank P. Ramsey - I.A. Richards

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At about his third visit he brought up the games of interpretation which Laura Riding and

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Robert Graves had been playing with the

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unpunctuated form of 'The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.' Taking the sonnet as a

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conjuror takes his hat, he produced an endless swarm of lively rabbits from it and ended

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by 'You could do that with any poetry, couldn't you?' This was a Godsend to a Director of

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Studies, so I said, 'You'd better go off and do it, hadn't you?'

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Despite Empson's great precocity and skill in both English and Mathematics, he was asked to leave Cambridge due to infractions against propriety - a servant discovered prophylactics in his room and he was also discovered, in media res, immoderately indulging his aphrodisia for a young woman, a fitting symbol of Empson's cheerful disregard for prevailing moral norms as well as of his grand appetite for life. As a result, not only did Empson never receive his M.A. in English, but he had his name stricken from the College records, was prevented from assuming a comfortable fellowship at Cambridge, and, astonishingly, was banished from the city of Cambridge, none of which seems, in retrospect, to the detriment of his subsequent critical output or eminence.

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