The New Leader, July 1st, 1985
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 career lasting half a century. Few, however, have loved literature as passionately as he did, or possessed it as personally. If many of his opinions were quirky, his methods and ideas nevertheless reshaped literary criticism. Empson's first landmark, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), published when he was in his 20s, revolutionized the reading of poetry by creating a vocabulary...
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