William Empson

Died
 Relevant Work

## Biography

Sir William Empson was English literary critic and poet, known for his focus on the close reading of literary works, a practice fundamental to New Criticism. His best known work is *Seven Types of Ambiguity,* published in 1930 when he was only 24 years old.

Empson discovered a love and talent for mathematics at an early age, winning scholarships to Winchester College and then Cambridge University in 1925. After a disapointing performance in his examinations, though, he decided to pursue English instead. A professor recalled talent for the discipline early on. However, a servant found condoms among his posessions and claimed to have caught him "in the act" with a woman. As a result, he was banished from Cambridge and his name was struck from the university's records.

Following this, Empson spent several years working as a freelance critic and journalist and then a teacher in China's Peking University. China was shortly invaded by the Japanese, though, and Empson found himself back in London in 1939. During the war, he worked as a journalist and, in 1941, befriended George Orwell.

After the war, Empson returned to Peking University. In the late 1940s-early 1950s, he taught a summer course at Ohio's Kenyon College. In 1953, Empson became Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London. In 1954, he was named head of the English Department at the University of Sheffield, where he remained until his retirement in 1972.

In 1979, he was knighted and Cambridge named him an honorary fellow, fifty years after expelling him.

Empson died in 1984.

## *Seven Types of Ambiguity*

### **Background and Historical Context**

*Seven Types of Ambiguity* "led a generation of critics in both England and America toward close verbal analysis, especially of lyric poetry. The methods developed were then extended by others to drama and prose fiction" (*Critical Theory Since Plato*, 3rd Edition).

### **Key Words and Terms**

**Ambiguity** - (as pertains to course reading): Where a detail is effective in several ways at once; "an indecision as to what you mean, an intention to mean several things, a probability that one or other or both of two things have been meant, and the fact that a statement has several meanings" (897)

**Onomatopoeia** - **"**the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named" (Google dictionary).

**Synaesthesia** - "one of the senses is described in terms of, or compared with, one of the others" (900).

### **Key Quotations**

 "I propose to use the word in an extended sense, and shall think relevant to my subject any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions in the same piece of language." (*Critical Theory Since Plato*, 3rd Edition, 895)

"The fundamental situation, whether it deserves to be called ambiguous or not, is that a word or a grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once" (*Critical Theory*, 895)

"The grace, the pathos, the 'sheer song' of the couplet is given by an enforced subtlety of intonation, from the difficulty of saying it so as to bring out all the implications....This last consideration...gives some hint as to why these devices belong to poetry rather than to prose, or indeed why poetry seems different from prose" (*Critical Theory*, 907).

"The reason, then, that ambiguity is more elaborate in poetry than in prose,...seems to be that the presence of metro and rhyme, admittedly irrelevant to the straightforward process of conveying a statement, makes it seem sensible to diverge from the colloquial order of statement, and so imply several colloquial orders from which the statement has diverged" (*Critical Theory*, 908).

"...there is no single mode of correspondence; ...very similar devices of sound may correspond effectively to very different meanings" (*Critical Theory*, 900).

### **Discussion**

Empson's Seven Types:

1. The Metaphor: when two things are said to be alike which have different properties
2. Using two different metaphor's at once which results into two or more meanings to be resolved
3. Two ideas connected through context can be given with one word simultaneously
4. Two or more things that don't agree but when combined they can make an authors complicated state of mind clear
5. A simile that lies halfway between two statements is used to describe when the author discovers his idea in the act of writitng
6. Readers are forced to invent a statement of their own occurs when a statement says nothing
7. Two words in context that are opposites of each other that expose a fundamental division in the author's mind

With these seven types that Empson discusses through poetry, this paved the way for the formation of new criticism in schools during the 20th century. New criticism emphasized close reading of literature to discover how that work functioned as a stand alone aesthetic work.

## References

Empson, William. *Seven Types of Ambiguity*. *Critical Theory since Plato*, edited by Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, 3rd ed., Thomson Wadsworth, 2004.