Even if William Empson had never written a word of poetry, his name would be important in any overall evaluation of twentieth-century letters. For Empson first became well known, not for his poetry, b...
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Critical Essay by Richard Eberhart
Empson, whatever initially caused his poetry, was typically a Cambridge writer: the passion for meticulous truth, the scientific attitudes intruding on poetry to ru...
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Critical Essay by Cleanth Brooks
[The] significance of Empson's criticism is this: his criticism is an attempt to deal with what the poem "means" in terms of its structure as a p...
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Critical Essay by A. Alvarez
[William Empson's] poetry has been used again and again for special purposes. I. A. Richards quoted his pupil's poems in his lectures since, among other rea...
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Critical Essay by Philip Gardner and Averil Gardner
G. S. Fraser, in a recent version of Eliot's view about 'true poetry' and communication, applied to Empson's poetry as ...
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The American Classics: A Personal Essay, by Denis Donoghue. Yale University Press, 295 pages, $27.Rapping the knuckles of the American classics is good fun-especially if it's done with a light, sha...
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"Was God in the Tsunami?" I woke up to that question in my Yahoo inbox four days after the waves struck, a posting from Beliefnet, a popular discussion list I subscribe to. It was the morning when ...
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I know that my recent near-arrest in front of C.I.A. headquarters will not go down as one of the landmark events in the history of espionage. Certainly it pales into insignificance next to recent d...
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I know that my recent near-arrest in front of C.I.A. headquarters will not go down as one of the landmark events in the history of espionage. Certainly it pales into insignificance next to recent d...
Read more
William Empson
Critical Essay by Richard Eberhart
A Brief Tour of the Classics, Led by a Nimble Expert
