Volume 54, Number 16 · October 25, 2007
Empson: Argufying Against Mufflement
By John Gross
William Empson, Volume II: Against the Christians
by John Haffenden
Oxford University Press, 797 pp., $65.00
Selected Letters of William Empson
edited by John Haffenden
Oxford University Press, 729 pp., $74.00
From the start of his career William Empson enjoyed a double reputation, as a poet and as a critic. It now seems clear that he has an additional claim to be remembered, as a letter-writer. The first volume of John Haffenden's biography of him, which appeared two years ago, broke off in 1940, when he was thirty-three.[1] The new volume takes the story up to his death in 1984, and at the same time Haffenden has brought out a volume of his correspondence—selected rather than collected, but still running to seven hundred pages. In some respects it can hardly avoid being seen as an adjunct of the biography, but it is much more. The letters are emphatically worth reading in their own right.
Review, 4408 words
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