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.

Milton's God

Empson's Milton's God was a sustained attack on Christianity and defence of Milton's attempt to 'justify God's ways to man' in Paradise Lost. Empson argues that precisely the inconsistencies and complexities adduced by critics as evidence of the poem's badness, in fact, function in quite the opposite manner: what the poem brings out is the difficulty faced by anyone in encountering and submitting to the will of God and, indeed, the great clash between the authority of such a deity and the determinate desires and needs of human beings. Empson notes that it is precisely Milton's great sensitivity and faithfulness to the Scriptures, in spite of their apparent madness, that generates such a controversial picture of God: it requires a mind of astonishing integrity to, as it were, be of the Devil's cause without knowing it.

Related Topics:
Christianity - Milton - Paradise Lost

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The tendency in surveys of Empson's achievement in Milton's God is, depending on one's politics, to marvel or bristle at the audacious perversity of his central thesis - though something of the same perversity was tidied up and reinterpreted in Stanley Fish's much lauded work on Milton (see, e.g., Surprised by Sin); this unfortunate tendency eclipses many of Empson's great insights and his grand intelligence, humanity and humour in reading the poem, and ignores the significance of the work as a presentation of one of the few instances of an effort to immunize the aesthetic achievements of the poem from those available only to individuals with certain doctrinaire religious commitments (see also the work of Balachandra Rajan).

Related Topics:
Stanley Fish - Milton - Balachandra Rajan

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Although perhaps not as influential as, say, Fish's work, Milton's God remains of great significance to any critically-minded reader of Paradise Lost and it is a far more human presentation of the reasons for, and the character of, the hold the poem has upon us. Empson portrays the work as the product of a man of astonishingly powerful and imaginative sensibilities and great intellect who had invested much of himself in the poem. Indeed, despite its lack of influence, certain critics view Milton's God as by far the best (that is to say, the most valuable) sustained work of criticism on the poem by a 20th century critic. Indeed Harold Bloom includes it as one of the few critical works worthy of canonical status in his The Western Canon (and the only critical work focusing solely on a single piece of literature). Regardless, Milton's God is an enriching and enjoyable experience of a critic of genius, wit and humanity encountering one of the towering achievements of English narrative poetry.

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