William Empson

Sir William Empson (27 September 1906 – 15 April 1984) was an English literary critic and poet, widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, a practice fundamental to New Criticism.

In 1925 Empson won a scholarship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics, gaining a first for his Part I but a disappointing upper-second for his Part II.

He then went on to pursue a second degree in English, and at the end of the first year he was offered a Bye Fellowship.

His supervisor in mathematics, Arthur Stanley Ramsey, expressed regret at Empson's decision to pursue English rather than mathematics, since it was a discipline for which Empson showed great talent.

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:

"At about his third visit he brought up the games of interpretation which Laura Riding and Robert Graves had been playing [in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 1927] with the unpunctuated form of 'The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.' Taking the sonnet as a conjuror takes his hat, he produced an endless swarm of lively rabbits from it and ended by 'You could do that with any poetry, couldn't you?' This was a Godsend to a Director of Studies, so I said, 'You'd better go off and do it, hadn't you?'"

But disaster struck when a servant found condoms among Empson's possessions and claimed to have caught him in flagrante delicto with a woman.

As a result, not only did he have his scholarship revoked, but his name was struck from the college records, he lost his prospects of a fellowship and he was banished from the city.

His best-known work is his first, Seven Types of Ambiguity, published in 1930.

After his banishment from Cambridge, Empson supported himself for a brief period as a freelance critic and journalist, living in Bloomsbury until 1930, when he signed a three-year contract to teach in Japan after his tutor had failed to find him a post teaching in China.

He returned to England in the mid-1930s only to depart again after receiving a three-year contract to teach at Peking University.

Upon his arrival he discovered that, because of the Japanese invasion of China, he no longer had a post.

He joined the exodus of the university's staff, with little more than a typewriter and a suitcase, and ended up in Kunming in China, with Lianda (Southwest Associated University), the school created there by students and professors who were refugees from the war in the North.

He arrived back in England in January 1939.

Then, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he taught a summer course for the intensive study of literature at the Kenyon School of English at Kenyon College in Ohio.

According to Newsweek, "The roster of instructors was enough to pop the eyes of any major in English."

In addition to Empson the fellows included John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, Arthur Mizener, Allen Tate and Yvor Winters.

In 1941 he met and married the South African sculptor, broadcaster and journalist Hetta Crouse; they were to have two sons.

Empson worked for a year on the daily digest of foreign broadcasts and in 1941 met George Orwell, at that time the Indian editor of the BBC Eastern Service, on a six-week course at what was called the Liars' School of the BBC.

They remained friends, but Empson recalled one clash: "At that time the Government had put into action a scheme for keeping up the birth-rate during the war by making it in various ways convenient to have babies, for mothers going out to work; government nurseries were available after the first month, I think, and there were extra eggs and other goodies on the rations. My wife and I took advantage of this plan to have two children. I was saying to George one evening after dinner what a pleasure it was to cooperate with so enlightened a plan when, to my horror, I saw the familiar look of settled loathing come over his face. Rich swine boasting over our privileges, that was what we had become ...".

Just after the war Empson returned to China.

He taught at Peking University, befriending a young David Hawkes, who later became a noted sinologist and chair of Chinese at Oxford University.

In 1953 Empson was professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London, for a year.

He then became head of the English Department at the University of Sheffield until his retirement in 1972.

In 1974 Empson accepted an offer of distinguished professorship at York University in Toronto.

He was knighted in 1979, the same year his old college, Magdalene, awarded him an honorary fellowship some 50 years after his expulsion.

Professor Sir William Empson died in 1984.

Empson's critical work is largely concerned with early and pre-modern works in the English literary canon.

He was a significant scholar of Milton (see below), Shakespeare (Essays on Shakespeare) and Elizabethan drama (Essays on Renaissance Literature, Volume 2: The Drama).

He published a monograph, Faustus and the Censor, on the subject of censorship and the authoritative version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.

He was also an important scholar of the metaphysical poets John Donne (Essays on Renaissance Literature, Volume 1: Donne and the New Philosophy) and Andrew Marvell.

Occasionally Empson brought his critical genius to bear on modern writers; Using Biography, for instance, contains papers on Henry Fielding's Tom Jones as well as the poems of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and Joyce's Ulysses.

Empson was styled a "critic of genius" by Frank Kermode, who qualified his praise by identifying wilfully perverse readings of certain authors.

Harold Bloom has stated that Empson is among a handful of critics who matter most to him because of their force and eccentricity.

Jonathan Bate has written that the three greatest English literary critics of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, "not least because they are the funniest".

Empson was the son of Arthur Reginald Empson of Yokefleet Hall, East Yorkshire.

His mother was Laura, daughter of Richard Mickelthwait, JP, of Ardsley House, Yorkshire.

He was a first cousin of the twins David and Richard Atcherley.

Empson first discovered his great skill and interest in mathematics at his preparatory school.

He won an entrance scholarship to Winchester College, where he excelled as a student and received what he later described as "a ripping education" in spite of the rather rough and abusive milieu of the school: a longstanding tradition of physical force, especially among the students, figured prominently in life at such schools.