Emperson

There is a nice review by Marjorie Perloff of the new book On Empson by Michael Wood, nice because it is interested, not self-serving, and because it tries to collect the various important ideas that Empson brought in the environment that eventually, despairingly, overrode them.

Empson was 22 when he produced, at the suggestion of his Cambridge supervisor I. A. Richards, a bulky manuscript called Seven Types of Ambiguity. Published in 1930, the book quickly became a classic, read and hotly debated in classrooms across Britain and the United States. Not until the 1970s, with the rise of Deconstruction, did Empson's star go down, the irony being (as Wood notes) that he anticipated so many of the theorems of what he called, in a letter to a friend, "those horrible Frenchmen"—he referred to the chef d'école of Deconstruction as "Nerrida"—who were "so very disgusting, in a social and moral way."

Wood explains:

"What Empson found disgusting was the seeking out, as he saw it, of complexity for complexity's sake, a project that was "always pretending to be plumbing the depths" but in reality was only congratulating itself on its cleverness. Above all he took it—this was in 1971—as just one more instance of what he saw as happening to language and literature everywhere: the human stakes were being removed, words were let loose in the playground, no agents or intentions were to be seen."

Forty years later, she writes hopefully, Empson may be making something of a comeback.

Here is Empson on the opening quat-rain of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

"The comparison [between boughs of the tree and choirs] holds for many reasons: because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallized out of the likeness of a forest, and colored with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves."

Michael Wood, who cites this passage, further comments:

"When I think of this poem I am most taken by the thought that the choirs and the birds can be both literal and metaphorical—the birds can be birds or boys, and they can sing in the ruin or in the forest; the choir is a choir and a cluster of trees—and a real tension arises as soon as we remember the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which occurred in the 1530s, and altered the architectural face of England in so many ways, to say nothing of Henry VIII's sources of income."

Contemporary readers, unaccustomed to such dissection of a single line of poetry, may complain that it is overkill; but as Wood points out, Empson's underlying assumption is that a real critic is first and foremost a writer—someone, as Barthes put it, who "experiences the depth" of language. Empson's method, like that of Barthes or (closer to home) T. S. Eliot, is inimitable, because his own imagination is so rich and idiosyncratic that it generates responses few other readers will fully share.

Seven Types of Ambiguity set the stage for a new way of reading poetry.

All Empson really meant to convey by announcing that there are 7 types of ambiguity (there might have been 17!) was that by definition, poetry was characterized by the multivalence of its language. An ambiguity is defined on the opening page of the book as "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." And Empson adds, commonsensically: "Sometimes .  .  . the word may be stretched absurdly far, but it is descriptive because it suggests the analytical mode of approach, and with that I am concerned."

"The analytical mode," which became Empson's stock-in-trade, involved a technical rigor (he initially came to Cambridge to study mathematics) that is the very antithesis of the current emphasis on what a given poem says, what information or morality it imparts. Denotation and connotation, metaphor and metaphysical conceit, pun, rhetorical figure, syntactic form, sound play, and rhythmic structure: All these aspects of poetic language are to be examined so as to detail the rich ambiguity of the poem in question—its power to charm by its range and depth. But unlike the American New Critics, who insisted on the "intentional fallacy," regarding a poem as an object not to be judged by external criteria including the poet's intention, and unlike Michael Foucault and Roland Barthes, who made their eloquent cases for "the death of the author," Empson was quite willing to use whatever biographical, historical, or cultural knowledge might be relevant in unpacking the meaning of the poems he discussed.

(from Marjorie Perloff's review of Wood's On Empson)