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, but for his contribution to literary criticism. In...

Ed. John Haffenden. Gainesville: U Florida P, 2001. xciv, 410 pp. $39.95. At first glance, The Complete Poems of William Empson seems to aspire to the condition of a contemporary edition of Shakespeare's sonnets and plays, or of Lycidas: after an exhaustive...

WILLIAM EMPSON was working on the manuscript of Using Biography (Harvard, 265 pp., $17.95) when he died in 1984 at the age of 78. It comes as a surprise to realize that a critic of his stature wrote only four books in a...

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, sharp touch. And nobody gets hurt, certainly not the great dead white males themselves, who...

"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 the death-toll estimates had gone into six figures...

G. S. Fraser, in a recent version of Eliot's view about 'true poetry' and communication, applied to Empson's poetry as read aloud a sensible distinction: 'Empson's broad semantics in poetry (the planting and repetition of words with a strong emotive charge) enable a listener to stop worrying about the narrow semantics, and to be carried on by the authority of the tone and the wonderfully effective … rhythms' [William Empson: The Man and His Work]. But ...

[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 reasons, they might have been written to prove his own theory of poetry; for example, they clearly and energetically took so many other disciplines in their stride. Then a poem like "High Dive" or "Part of Mandevil's Travels" makes me think that Empson himself used his own poetry; the puns, references and pro...

[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 poem. To sense its importance, one must recall what the critic in the past has attempted to do: either he attempted to find the goodness of the poem (and its status as poetry) in terms of its prose argument—and in terms of the "truth" of what was being said—and thus made poetry compete with philosophy or science; or e...