Volume 32, Number 6 · April 11, 1985
Hero of the Word
By Robert M. Adams
Using Biography
by William Empson
Harvard University Press, 265 pp., $17.50
Collected Poems
by William Empson
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 119 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Sir William Empson: An Annotated Bibliography
by Frank Day
Garland, 229 pp., $45.00
It was more than fifty years ago that William Empson, then a fresh graduate of Cambridge University, popped up over the critical horizon with Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). Reading it over again now, a few months after his death, one thinks at once what a thoroughly agreeable book it is. Tough, funny, intelligent, audacious, and deprecatory by turns, it's very much a young man's book—excited and nervy throughout. I find the margins of my old copy scrawled over in about equal quantities with indignant protests and delighted exclamation points. Needless to say, if I were annotating the book today in this informal fashion. I'd reverse the position of some of these pluses and minuses. The fact remains that Empson's first book was, and still is, a wonderfully stimulating study. There are, to be sure, passages that work through a logical problem after the manner of a mathematics professor solving an extended string of equations under his breath at high speed; but they are balanced by others where his insights flare into instant conviction.
Review, 4494 words
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