Roma Gill - William Empson: The Man and His Work

Volume 14

Edited by
ROMA GILL

First published in 1974 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

This edition first published in 2017
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1974 Routledge & Kegan Paul

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ISBN: 978-1-138-69377-7 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-315-52921-9 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-68354-9 (Volume 14) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-68357-0 (Volume 14) (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-54445-8 (Volume 14) (ebk)

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Edited by
Roma Gill

First published in 1974
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
Broadway House, 6874 Carter Lane,
London EC4V 5EL and
9 Park Street Boston, Mass. 02108, USA
Printed in Great Britain by
Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press), Ltd,
Bungay, Suffolk
Routledge & Kegan Paul 1974
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the publisher,
except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism

ISBN 0 7100 7823 4

Roma Gill

When I first approached some of William Empsons friends in search of papers for this volume, I asked them to write about the man himself, or his work, or the subjects that interested him. I hoped thereby to achieve some sort of coherence for the series of essays, and also to give some impression of the man, the poet, and the critic who has been such a powerful influence in the twentieth century. The first aim might have been satisfied had I asked for papers only on the Elizabethans for instance; but this would have given a false impression. Empson, as the bibliography of his published works clearly indicates, has no period, no narrow specialism. The papers presented here range from the biographical to the academic; but what every one suggests is the impossibility of separating the man from his work and the life from the thoughteven on a ski-ing holiday.

My thanks are due to all the contributors to this volume, for their papers and for their enthusiasm.

The poem A Toast by W. H. Auden on first appeared in his collection Epistle to a Godson (1972) and is printed here by courtesy of Faber & Faber.

On his retirement in 1971 from the Chair of English Literature at the University of Sheffield William Empson founded a prize to be awarded annually for the encouragement of student drama; royalties from the sale of this book will be contributed towards this fund.

W. H. Auden

As quid pro quo for your enchanting verses,
when approached by Sheffield, at first I wondered
if I could manage Just a Smack at Empson,
but nothing occurred.

All I could fault was your conceit that Miltons
God, obtrusive prolix baroque Olympian,
is our Christian one. Who, though, but you has pondered
so deeply on Alice?

Good voices are rare, still rarer singers with
perfect pitch. If Graves was right, if at Cambridge
the tunings a wee bit sharp, then at Oxford
it well may be flat.

Our verbal games are separate, thank heaven,
but Time twins us: both learned to person Life in
an open-hearthed, nannied, un-T-Vd world, where
cars looked peculiar.

To wish you long long years would be heartless (may you
leave when you want to, no earlier): but I gladly,
dear Bill, dear fellow mandarin, smile to your
future holidays.

M. C. Bradbrook

If I were asked to choose the greatest passage of criticism in Empson, I would plump for the analysis of Pope on the Duke of Chandoss seat, Canons; especially its conclusion.

When Pope prophesies the destruction of the building his language takes on a grandeur which reflects back and transfigures it:

Another age shall see the golden ear

Embrown the slope and nod on the parterre,

Deep harvest bury all his pride has planned,

And laughing Ceres reassume the land.

These lines seem to me to convey what is called an intuitive intimacy with nature; one is made to see a cornfield as something superb and old as humanity, and breaking down dykes irresistibly, like the sea. But, of course, it embrowns as with further, more universal gilding and nods on the parterre like a duchess.

This seems to me rather a curious example of the comparison which elevates both parties; in this case, it is the admiration latent in a sneer which becomes available as a source of energy for these subsidiary uses; and also an example of how the Wordsworthian feeling for nature can be called forth not by an isolated and moping interest in nature on her own account, but by a conception of nature in terms of human politics. I hope, at any rate, you agree with me, that the lines convey this sort of sympathy intensely; that there is some sense of the immensity of harvest through a whole country; that the relief with which the cripple for a moment identifies himself with something so strong and generous gives these two couplets an extraordinary scale. Seven Types of Ambiguity,

This is not the sort of writing with which Empson is most often associated; but it shews that his intellectual gymnastics, those analyses of variables by which he displays himself as most mathematically agile, are rooted in a much warmer and richer organic response to complex human situations embodied in Nature. In the passage quoted, he enjoys the transfiguration of the scene as he does in his own poems:

How much more foliage appears by starlight;