Volume 48, Number 11 · July 5, 2001
'Good Voices Are Rare'
By James Fenton
The Complete Poems of William Empson
edited by John Haffenden
University Press of Florida, 410 pp., $39.95
Most of the poetry of William Empson was written and published by 1940, but Empson had an interesting career and influence as a poet. While he was well known and liked in the Thirties, it was in the Fifties that he became a cult figure among writers, and it is in the Fifties that we can really feel his influence extending to other poets on both sides of the Atlantic. In England we find it among the poets and novelists known loosely as the Movement, especially in the work of John Wain. In America no doubt the criticism for which Empson was also famous became a vector for his poetic influence: Marianne Moore recommended Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity to Elizabeth Bishop in the Thirties; Richard Eberhart, who had studied at Cambridge with I.A. Richards and Empson, taught Robert Lowell at boarding school; Randall Jarrell was an admirer of Empson; and so the list could continue.
Review, 3303 words
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